Office vacancies are on the rise in our post-pandemic world where employees still want to work from home and not commute into the office.
While efforts are being made to welcome employees back to the office, it hasn’t been enough to rescue the office market in several major cities.
One building type’s problem could become an opportunity for an enterprising hotel developer. If the vacant office building space is in a prime location where land is hard to come by, converting to hotel rooms could prove to be a worthwhile investment. However, there are some unique challenges with converting an office building to a hotel. Understanding the potential issues and solutions will lead to a successful adaptive reuse.
During your initial feasibility review, a zoning and code analysis should be one of your early priorities. Both the building and zoning codes treat office buildings and hotels as different uses. This will no doubt have an impact on the parking calculations. For office buildings, parking spaces are typically determined based upon square feet of the total office floorplate. For hotels, the requirements are typically one space per room from a brand and could be higher depending upon restaurant and meeting space components. Some zoning codes and brands would allow reductions for an urban property’s parking requirement based upon the extensive use of rideshare, reducing the parking load. Also, some jurisdictions allow for shared parking agreements with office buildings based upon the theory that the parking times seldom overlap for hotels and office tenants.
Office column grids are typically 20 feet or 30 feet on center; that doesn’t match hotel guestroom bay spacing. The grid layout in a hotel varies depending on the area of the hotel. Ballrooms and meeting spaces want to have wide, expansive column spacing to allow for an open floor plan for meetings and conventions. An experienced design team can help to solve the column grid changes on the upper guestroom levels with columns that land in the middle of a guestroom. The second issue is the office building width is generally deeper than a hotel rooms’ tower. Hotel room towers are typically 65 to 70 feet wide, whereas office buildings are 80 to 100 feet deep. This extra depth is generally not necessary for the hotel layout. Designing and programming the interior space is important given that that is an increased cost that typically results in little if any additional revenue for the hotel.
The elevators and stair locations in an office building tend to be centrally located in the middle of the building to allow maximum square footage for leased, rental space. The stairs in a hotel tend to be toward the ends of the hotel. It will be very important to create a hotel corridor plan that meets the required building code requirements of two isolated exits and allows for the elevator bays to be closed off in a high-rise building. Elevator cores are also offset in many office buildings to create better floor plates for offices. This can lead to unbalanced corridor layouts which affect efficient guestroom plan layouts. Cores of office buildings also have public restrooms for the typical floor. These will need to be removed but likely will not have sufficient plumbing risers to serve more than a few guestrooms.
The ceiling heights in an office building can be between 10 and 12 feet depending on the age and quality of the office building. Hotel guestrooms tend to have a height of 8 to 9 feet. This provides some space to run hotel plumbing as well as sprinkler and HVAC systems, but the need to install a dropped ceiling in the guestrooms and corridors can be an expense that doesn’t exist in ground-up hotel construction. The ceiling heights do not allow for typical hotel public space and meeting room ceiling heights. This can push all public space in the lobby level of the office building which is often designed to support retail activities.
More than most other building types, hotels have a large back-of-house space for sales/management staff, housekeeping, employee break room and food preparation areas. These spaces are not programmed in most commercial office buildings. Finding the space for support facilities in an office building can often lead to hard-to-operate hotels when the typical adjacencies cannot be maintained. Since office buildings and hotels have very different operating models, it takes an experienced team to find a way to have the guest experience not be negatively affected by the adaptive reuse of the building.
The challenges of converting an office building to a hotel are unique, but not insurmountable. The key is to hire an experienced, hospitality architect that understands the nuances and intricacies of hotel design. Given the current office vacancy rates and the the fact that it is hard to find an A-quality site in many urban markets, the adaptive reuse of an office building to a hotel can be a great repurposing of an underperforming asset.
Warren G. Feldman, AIA, ISHC is Chief Executive Officer of Nehmer, a leading architecture, interior design, and project management firm specializing in the hospitality industry.
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