A 33-room boutique hotel set in the Christchurch Arts Centre, its heritage rooms and observatory tower restored, earning to help keep the precinct going.
The Observatory Hotel
Te Matatiki Toi OraThe Arts Centre, Te Matatiki Toi Ora, is one of the country's largest clusters of heritage buildings, facing a long and costly restoration after the Canterbury earthquakes. A hotel was a new use for the precinct, a way to earn a steady income the Arts Centre Trust could put back into arts and culture.
The former physics building became The Observatory, a 33-room boutique hotel with its observatory tower restored to working order.
RCP had been on the wider restoration programme since 2014, and took the hotel from feasibility and business case, weighing up what the physics building could become before a hotel was chosen. RCP structured the commercial side, ran the operator procurement and managed the design and build through to handover.
The precinct's early restoration had run on a cost-reimbursable model, a response to the scale of the damage and the uncertainty of what each building needed. It struggled: budgets were regularly exceeded, and contractors came and went, taking hard-won knowledge with them. For the hotel, RCP researched, recommended and put in place an NEC4 target-cost contract, a UK model built on shared risk and reward and early warning. It kept one contractor and one team on the job to completion.
The Observatory opened under budget and ahead of programme, a working hotel inside a heritage arts precinct, earning to help keep the Arts Centre's real work going.
