Designed by dRMM, a new hotel in Cambridge’s emerging Eddington town centre showcases the versatility of modern blockwork and mediates between the university’s commitment to design quality and placemaking, and evolving trends in hotel design.

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The Hyatt Centric enjoys a more dominant presence on the main eastern elevation

The browny-pink elevations of dRMM’s ingenious double-branded hotel for edyn Group add a welcome note of colour to the chalky-buff conformity of Cambridge University’s 150-hectare Eddington development. The project brings interest to the last urban block in Eddington’s emerging town centre, on Cambridge’s northwest fringe close to the M11.

The block accommodates a Hyatt Centric, a ‘flexible lifestyle’ city-centre brand, and a Turing Locke aparthotel. The latter celebrates Alan Turing’s genius, nurtured at Cambridge, while the ‘Locke’ bit of the name is edyn’s aparthotel brand. Both sit happily in a single structure, distinguished externally by variations in each elevation. The Hyatt Centric enjoys a more dominant visual presence on the main eastern elevation overlooking Eddington Avenue, the centre’s main north-south boulevard with maturing trees and green swales.

The 330 rooms and apartments are split 150 and 180 between the two brands, and the nightly rates/monthly rents testify to demand for a hotel in this new edge-of-city location. Hyatt Centric’s rooms are around £250 a night, up from £150 in lockdown, or around £2,000 a month for a Turing Locke apartment; pretty much London rates for amid-range hotel or compact studio space. The Hyatt caters for short stay leisure and business visitors, while the Turing Locke can accommodate people from a single night to a year, mainly serving the transient academic and research community.

Buildings.

Commercial evidence suggests that the university’s decision to develop Eddington, and edyn’s decision to develop a large hotel here offering such a mix, is paying off. Cambridge is expanding in a way London might envy. The quality of urban and architectural design that the university has sought and established at Eddington has to be an ingredient in its popularity. Evidence also that it was perhaps unwise of Mr Gove to drop plans for the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, one of the more enlightened bits of macro-planning in the UK.

Eddington’s surrounding built homes are filled with a lively social mix of students, private owners and renters, and subsidised affordable housing for academic staff. A mix that will propel the town centre retail units, some of which have yet to open, but which include a Sainsbury’s (by Wilkinson Eyre), cafés and smaller shops.

dRMM’s hotel reflects the practice’s consistent ability to produce something out of the ordinary, using readily available affordable materials. A substantial city block floats above a glazed and open ground floor, featuring three cut-through routes to a central courtyard that is open to the passing public, and links the whole ground level to surrounding urban spaces. A new take on the collegiate quads of the city’s historic centre, but here you are welcomed in and can walk on the grass.

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Different blockwork treatments distinguish the two brands. Hyatt Centric is asymmetric, smooth, chamfered and flows horizontally. Turing Locke is rugged and darker with the emphasis on its vertical, symmetrical composition.

The block has an overall presence that’s not easy to achieve in today’s normally reactionary planning process, especially with a client as cost sensitive as you’d expect a chain hotel developer/operator to be. It’s a welcome outcome from a combo’ of a classy expert landowner demanding quality and an urbane contemporary client who knows global hospitality trends – all achieved in consultation with the University of Cambridge Quality Panel and Cambridge City Council.

The Hyatt Centric blockwork is smooth, asymmetric, chamfered and flows horizontally. The Turing Locke element is rugged and darker, with the emphasis on its vertical, symmetrical composition. The practice’s long-established relationship with Lignacite, whose factory is 40 minutes away, and with whom it worked on buildings for the Olympic Village and the Blackpool Tower of Love, has paid dividends here.

All the upper floors are made from standard blocks, but these have been sliced into three lengthwise to give a ‘Roman’ horizontal format that matches the proportions of the long elevations. Where fair-faced, the blocks are a lighter shade, and where ‘snapped’ rather than cut, on the Turing Locke elevations, the rugged texture catches the shadows.

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An origami-like inverted winged metal canopy shelters a roof terrace at the building’s south east corner, overlooking Market Square.

This makes the Turing Locke look heavier. At its base the ground-floor glazing is set deep into the façade emphasising solidity. Windows along the whole façade are underlined at their base with a thin strip of dark charcoal block. The slicing and snapping of the blocks are two neat, simple ideas that help to avoid the monotony of repetitive hotel elevations. dRMM deployed similar thinking with its use of variegated bricks for the larger elevations on its Elephant & Castle housing scheme.

The hotel sits between the two main spaces in the Aecom-led masterplan. To the south is Market Square, the commercial centre, with a Sainsbury’s and other shops and cafés. Opposite is the Stirling Prize-shortlisted Storey’s Field community centre and nursery by MUMA, and a circular primary school by Marks Barfield. Behind these is Storey’s Field, the main green public space, which has a dedicated cycleway back to the city centre.

All of the hotel’s amenities are shared by both brands’ guests, animating the ground floor with restaurant, co-working space, bars, café, gym and shop. Each brand has its own reception on the main Eddington Avenue elevation with service and car park entrance on the rear elevation.

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Robert Myers’ landscape design adds to the range of public spaces on offer in the town centre with intimate, planted spaces that contrast with the hard landscaped Market Square and the more open grounds of Storey’s Fields.

The site slopes down by 2-3 metres towards Market Square; the ground floor manages this fall allowing more generous storey heights at the southern Hyatt Centric end, and cosier more domestically-scaled dimensions for the Turing Locke reception at the northern end. Back of house operations are tucked away in the northwest corner of the plan, with key staffrooms having a view over the courtyard.

The courtyard is lined with reflective pale green glazing and frames the sky. Shared by the public and guests, it is overlooked at the northern end by terraces to the first floor level of apart-rooms in the Turing Locke wing.

Robert Myers’ landscape design creates two distinct zones: a picnic area overlooked by a white amphitheatre, and denser planted zones with paths weaving between them. The courtyard adds to the range of spaces on offer in the town centre, being different from the hard landscaped Market Square and the more open Storeys Fields grounds. Some colourful sculptures by artist Fiona Curran beckon visitors into the space from Market Square. A public route under the eastern elevation into the courtyard features planted areas and a unifying soffit clad in ‘orange-peel’ textured aluminium panels. This undercroft feels a bit tight at its lowest, northern end.

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Public routes through the central courtyard link the ground level to surrounding urban spaces; a new take on Cambridge’s historic collegiate quads, where you are welcomed in and can walk on the grass.

At the hotel’s south-east corner overlooking Market Square the origami form of an inverted winged metal canopy pops up above the Eddington skyline sheltering a roof terrace beneath. It looks enticing and turns the new hotel into a new urban landmark, especially at night when terrace lights reflect off the underside, made from the same ‘orange peel’ panels used on the ground floor. Guests and visitors can enjoy unobstructed views back towards the city centre and of the surrounding fenland horizon. More weather protection might be needed to make it useable year-round. Solar panels occupy the rest of the roof space.

The masonry mass of the upper floors houses a rational layout of rooms with circulation cores and storage at the internal corners of the plan, maximising room efficiency. This leaves long corridors for circulation with rooms on either side. But these meet external façades at their ends allowing natural light to flow into the corridors. They also offer a couple of larger unallocated spaces that might be useful workspaces. Larger two-bed Locke apartments are fitted into the corners of the plan and are dual aspect.

The hotel has a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating. Its upper floors overhang and shade the glazed ground floor, while elements of exposed concrete structure aid thermal cooling. Deep masonry reveals shade the windows and reduce heat gain. A heat-recovery air-handling system provides heating and cooling with openable windows linked to smart sensors.

This mixed-mode approach means hotel design guidance is met while free cooling augments the renewable energy benefits of the PV roof panels.

The university originally envisaged the scheme as car-free with no parking. There is a park and ride facility five minutes away and the bulk of visitors would be university-orientated. But it was thought desirable to encourage local non-university residents (‘town’ as opposed to ‘gown’) from further afield to visit the hotel to dine, and there were fears about parking demand taking up spaces in the nearby Sainsburys. Fairly late in the design process 75 basement car spaces were required under the hotel, reflecting an aspect of the traditional ‘town v gown’ debate, with the University wishing to welcome local people to Eddington – even if that meant impacting sustainability targets.

Adaptive re-use is factored in. The ground floor’s ‘free plan’ with its regular grid allows the floor plate to be replanned for alternative uses independently of the hotel floors above, or parts of the through routes could be glazed-in to provide extra ground floor space. The grid of the upper floors also makes it straightforward to adjust the number of rooms assigned to each brand. Just re-fit the relevant rooms. The business can be tuned to suit a changed market without major changes to block or services.

Bird, bee and bat ‘hotels’ adorn the external elevations. Trees and shrubs in the courtyard have berries to attract wildlife. The 200 cycle spaces, including 40 for hire bikes, encourage visitors to don lycra and forego the taxi into Cambridge. E-charging is provided for basement car spaces.

The building’s structural frame combines in-situ concrete with light-gauge steel, supported on piles. The basement car park and basement are formed by sheet pile retaining walls with concrete cap beams. And from basement to first floor slab, the structure is concrete with in-situ slabs and regularly spaced concrete columns. The first floor slab acts as a transfer structure.

Upstairs, the floors are a concrete slab on profiled steel deck supporting a light gauge steel framing of the partition walls. The upper façades are made up of infill steel structural framing, while the roof-terrace canopy sits on a streel frame. Concrete lift and stair cores, with shear walls, provide lateral stability at each corner.

The big compromise is the University’s decision to agree to more parking when all are sworn to carbon reduction, something dRMM holds dear. The battle was probably lost when Sainsbury’s got a larger car park. Let’s hope technology progressively cuts the carbon as Eddington grows into what could be our best example of edge-of-town development, now boasting two new hotels.

Is it better to have a quality development that ticks economically and socially, than struggles because people can’t get to it?

Additional Images

Credits

Project team

Client
edyn Group
Architect
dRMM
Structural engineer
Manhire Associates
M&E consultant
Applied Energy
Cost consultant
Tower Eight
Landscape consultant
Robert Myers Associates
Catering consultant
CBP Independent Catering Design Services
Interior designer
AvroKO
Project manager
Gardiner & Theobald
Planning consultant
AECOM
Acoustic engineer
Sandy Brown Associates/Cole Jarman
Fire engineer/Building control
Bureau Veritas
Daylight/RoL consultant
GIA

Wind consultant
Windtech
Traffic consultant
Peter Brett Associates
Artist
Fiona Curran
Main contractor
Gilbert-Ash

Selected suppliers
and subcontractors

Masonry
Lignacite
Glazing
Aluprof
Rainscreen glass
Proteus
Facades
Imperial Facades
MEP
Sharp
RC frame
Connells
Excavation
Mick George