Festival of Hospitality – Leading the Way

In the earlier Festival of Hospitality panel we heard from investors, lenders, developers, hoteliers and project managers regarding who they believe is driving the sustainability agenda within hospitality.

Taking the learnings from this conversation Elliott Wood are talking with people from within the design world to see how we can influence and affect a change in the sustainability agenda.

How do we as an industry lead the conversation and how can we provide solutions that are effective, timely and durable, creating a meaningful change across the hotel construction world?

Chair:

Andy Downey, Elliott Wood
Andy Downey is a Director at Elliott Wood and a strategic thinker. Engineering is the basis of this but today’s challenges demand a broader more holistic approach. This means a focus on society and how, through good engineering, we can make this better, more ethical and healthier. He pushes this ‘Engineering a Better Society’ message across all projects at Elliott Wood and through their internal Academy. Changing habits is at the core of the challenge and this begins within their own engineering teams. Andy hosts and talks frequently at many events and has become a regular judge for projects in the built environment.

Speakers:

Nicholas de Klerk, Translation Architecture
Nicholas is a UK qualified and chartered architect and founded Translation Architecture in December 2020 having built up more than 20 years of experience in the UK, the Middle East and South Africa. His portfolio includes urban and resort hotels, museums, retail and gallery projects.

One of the practice’s core interests is to develop low energy, low carbon approaches to retrofit, with the aim of improving the environmental performance of existing hotel properties. The practice’s first two projects explore this in the context of a Grade II listed, timber-framed,15th Century coaching inn and a 1930’s seaside resort hotel.

Rachel Hoolahan, Orms Architects
Rachel Hoolahan is an architect and sustainability co-ordinator at Orms Architects, a leading London practice with extensive experience working with existing buildings. For the past few years, the practice has engaged in a series of deep research assignments and is utilising this data and knowledge to push the boundaries of sustainable development – both in refurbishment and new build projects.

Recently, she led a research piece on material passports as part of a wider Grosvenor Estate Innovation Project into material reuse. The outcome of this work is a methodology for encouraging more meaningful material reuse, by creating a material database for the project. The approach is deliberately open source and flexible, allowing design teams of any size or skill set to apply the work to their projects.

Neil Andrews, Perkins&Will
Perkins&Will prides itself on being at the forefront of sustainable and healthy design and over the past two years have made pledges that outline their intent to reach net zero design in architecture and workplace interiors, backed by research conducted by global experts. More recently they have launched ‘Now Database’ which is an open share resource for designers seeking sustainable materials and suppliers.

Neil Andrews and his team are currently working to apply sustainable design to hospitality spaces, following circular design principles and will soon be making our Net Zero Pledge for Hospitality. Within that they aim to outline how they will get to net zero design, and also educate hotel operators and owners as to how they can join them on the journey.

Georgia Foy, Iceni
Iceni are an award-winning planning consultancy with a positive and creative mindset and a focus on sustainability, such as our Sustainable Development Scorecard. We in the Built Heritage and Townscape team believe that heritage assets and townscape are opportunities to be embraced; and that change, adaptation or development will often be the key to securing their future. For us, built heritage and sustainability go hand-in-hand, whether this is preserving and retrofitting historic building stock, improving the energy efficiency of traditional buildings or championing innovative new development.

Why not join us for the day and find out more about The Building Society and our community? Register your free pass to our Festival of Hospitality – Social, Work & Play day here: 7 October: Festival of Hospitality – Social, Work & Play