New castle-sized Park Hyatt Auckland comes with moat
Behemoth hotel literally under wraps but tour reveals features
It’s big enough for three times as many guests but only 195 rooms have been built, a moat surrounds the commercial kitchen and the detail of room design was so important that prototypes were built in Beijing.
Welcome to the first tour inside the five-star, $300 million Park Hyatt Auckland on Halsey St, aiming to be New Zealand’s most luxurious new offering.
The block, being built by Hawkins, is looming large on its 100m by 50m site on the waterfront. Due for completion about the middle of next year, it is covered in building wrap.
The Herald was invited on a tour of the building behemoth, given a sneak peek by Fu Wah’s South Pacific region area general manager, Richard Aitken. No photos were allowed to be taken.
As part of the sustainability standards and because it’s built on reclaimed land, the hotel has only 25 valet carparks so you’re most likely to enter via its expansive covered porte-cochere off Halsey St, on the southwest face of the block, an area to be lined with local artwork, greenery, flowers and native plants.
On entering the lobby, the building’s most striking feature is the grandeur of its seven-level high internal atrium, which creates a void of more than 25m, to be flooded with natural light from lines of roof-top skylights.
Aitken said the building measured about 5000sq m, the equivalent of a half-hectare. And he acknowledged the sheer size of the hotel’s areas, saying that gave it the international five-star edge.
“A lot of the building has been given over to open space to improve the guest experience. We could put three times as many guests into here but if you want a different experience, this is what you put into it.”
Fu Wah’s South Pacific region development manager, Tony McKee, pointed out another five-star feature: “This hotel has single-loaded corridors,” he said, referring to the layout of hotel rooms on one side of 2.8m-wide corridors or hallways, not both sides.
The moat is a shallow water feature which runs around two sides of the commercial kitchens on the redone three times to test and improve the design. Each time the rooms were rebuilt we would send six to eight people up from Auckland and bring in the rest of the design team from London and Singapore,” Aitken said.
And within the new hotel, a prototype room has also been developed and is already fully furnished, looking ready to occupy, though surrounded by a construction site. No details can be revealed on the interior design.
The hotel was designed by Singapore-based architects AR+D working with New Zealand practice Bossley Architects. Interior design is by Britain’s Conran + Partners.
A chairman’s suite will be 183sq m. A president’s suite is the most luxurious at 245sq m.
The main lobby’s reception desk backs on to Halsey St, with a bank of three guest lifts on the northern edge of that central area.
Aitken said about 500 workers and staff were now at the property and the 138 Chinese workers being flown in to finish the hotel had begun to arrive. Specialists in fine decorating, wood and finishing trades, they were needed due to the labour shortage in New Zealand.
To date, about a million hours have gone into building the hotel.