As the gold plaque at the entrance is quick to remind its guests, the Midland Hotel in Manchester is most famous as the place where the honourable Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce first met.
And the £15 million transformation of this landmark railway hotel is as sleekly engineered as the engines which resulted from that rendezvous - not so much a full throttle assault on the senses as a finely tuned, smooth running operation.
As with so many grande dame hotels, the Midland has had more than one owner in recent years, not all of them as careful as might be hoped.
Built in 1903 by the Midland Railway Company as their flagship hotel, by the time of its centenary in 2003, the hotel was looking in need of an overhaul.
But current incumbents Q Hotels (formerly Quintessential) have shown their willingness to invest in the hotels they have inherited.
The Leeds-based group acquired the Grade II-listed property in 2004, as one of the three hotels left when Alchemy sold 13 Paramount Hotels to Dawnay Shore in July 2004. Since then Q Hotels have acquired a further five hotels and embarked on a significant refurbishment programme throughout the portfolio. They have spent over £6m on Chesford Grange, and The Queens Hotel in Leeds completed a £10m restoration in the summer of 2005. A further £29m is being invested in other properties, including The Park Royal, Norton Park, and the recently acquired Cheltenham & Gloucester Chase.
But the £15 million which has been spent on The Midland is their largest investment in a single property to date, and as general manager Mike Magrane acknowledges, it was sorely needed: "With the influx of new hotels to Manchester we had no intention of resting on our laurels," he says in reference to the arrival of new five star properties such as Radisson Edwardian's conversion of the Free Trade Hall, the celeb friendly Great John Street hotel and a soon-to-be completed Hilton.
Now, he claims, the hotel is "exactly where it belongs - back at the forefront of the region."
The refurbishment commenced in November 2004 and has involved all public areas, meeting & conference rooms, function suites and bedrooms and corridors, plus the addition of nine new bedrooms, bringing the total number to 312.
The hotel's food and beverage operations have also been overhauled. What once served as the main restaurant of the hotel is now The Trafford Room, a function suite catering for up to 200 guests. The biggest structural change - the insertion of a mezzanine bar area in one of the stairwells - has eased pre-function congestion in the corridors. And an area previously used as reservations offices has been transformed into a new bar - The Wyvern - named after the old emblem of the Midland Railway Company. It is an eminently more sensible use of the space given its streetside location overlooking busy St Peters Square.
This new look is the work of a London based design firm, Charles Leon Associates, working with Q Hotels in-house team and main contractors Ramparts. Charles Leon explains:
"We studied photographs and original plans of the hotel to get a sense of its grand past then set out to revive the hotel's stature and gravitas." Nowhere is this more evident than in the lobby, restored to something approaching its original glory with atmospheric lighting (overseen by Maurice Brill), slender and dignified columns, and a polished marble floor. As Leon says, "The ground floor is, and has always been, one of Manchester's most important meeting and greeting spaces and sets the tone for the hotel."
Extracts from WH Auden's 'Night Mail', etched into glass panels around the ceiling coves, are a more direct reference to the hotel's railway origins.
The most effective historical elements of the design are not entirely authentic. As Charles Leon says "hotels are about people not buildings." The framed collages of love letters and sepia tinted photos that adorn the corridors hint at illicit liaisons which would be heartrending if they weren't the fictional creations of the design team, albeit ones often based on genuine fragments of paraphernalia discovered in the hotel's extensive archives.
Yet the realities of converting the building were more prosaic.
Contractors Ramparts describe it as one of their toughest, and most satisfying, challenges ever.
Before stripping out the tired old reception areas, a temporary, full-sized reception, had to be constructed in the back of the hotel, complete with a fully-furnished temporary corridors and waiting areas, so that guests would not be affected by the substantial renovations.
With business as usual at the back of the hotel, the entire front of house was completely stripped and re-designed. Old plaster pillars were removed, and the ramps and stairs up to the Octagon reshaped to create a more open and accessible space. The famous French Restaurant was given a full face-lift with all new furnishings, including two £5,000 chandeliers. The Wyvern Bar was fully re-fitted as a luxury lounge bar with plush leather furnishings.
The Octagon itself has undergone a soft refurbishment, including all new cornices, marble effect, a Moroccan lantern and a new, modern bar.
This being a listed building, original features have been retained wherever possible, including the polished wood panelling in the Lancaster, as well as new features, such as the moulded plaster panels in the Alexandra Suite, which have been cleverly taken from castes of the outside of the hotel.
At the time of Sleeper's visit, work on the work on the public areas was still in progress, including a complete refit of all the grand meeting rooms , ready to be completed by the time the hotel hosts the Labour Party's 2006 annual Conference this Spring.
