Dexter Moren seals planning approval for Maidstone hotel

Dexter Moren Associates (DMA) has secured planning approval for a new 132-key hotel on Week Street in the centre of Maidstone. Alongside a reception, lobby, café area and restaurant, the 5,779m² hotel will include the town’s first publicly accessible rooftop bar, with views overlooking the Kentish hills.

Taking into account the sensitive location, DMA has carefully sculpted the form of the building, squaring off some corners and using indents and setbacks to reduce the massing and minimise the visual impact from Week Street and other key views. The hotel stands at three storeys facing the town’s main pedestrianised shopping area, with the nine-storey element sitting modestly behind the taller Colman House office block. The long, narrow site also prevented the use of windows along the boundary, necessitating a creative use of lightwells and room planning to bring daylight into the hotel.

“There were concerns about putting a newbuild hotel onto such a sensitive site, fronting onto a key shopping street, surrounded by low-rise and historically important buildings and bordered by three conservation areas,” explains Herbert Lui, Partner at DMA. “However, we worked closely with planning officers, the design review panel, committee members and stakeholders to create a design that both fits in with its surroundings and brings a new energy to the high street area.”

The design has also taken its materiality from the locale, using multi-stock red brick, which has subtle variations in tone, to complement the character of surrounding buildings and be unobtrusive to the high street. The specification includes locally sourced materials such as ragstone cladding too, which will offer a muted background to the contrasting copper banding detail and give the facade articulation.

“The client’s brief was to explore the opportunity to redevelop the site with a landmark building to match the 11-storey office building next to it,” Lui concludes. “We worked hard to reassure the authorities, through our designs and choices of materials, that this new hotel would be a respectful and quality piece of architecture and a positive contributor to the regeneration of the town centre – with elements such as the publicly accessible rooftop bar likely to attract patrons from outside the hotel.”

The landmark property – which sits on the site of a former Mothercare building – will bring additional footfall and an estimated £650,000 in annual spending to the heart of Maidstone. The scheme builds on Assetrock’s track record of developing challenging, often overlooked sites, seeing in them opportunities to create assets for communities, boosting local economies and acting as a catalyst for job creation.