Queens Hotel - Hotel Designs Review

Hotel Designs


Note the decortative 'flame' treatment of the plaster uplighters in the Conference Lobby (click on the image to see an enlarged view). The stairs lead to more meeting spaces, all free WiFi enabled
Doors are made to echo the 30's style	Berhind the lobby is the grand Ballroom and various meeting and board rooms. These would originally have been a series of dining rooms (there was a French dining room, a grill room and a brasserie “the cheapest department with meals served at popular prices”), but today they are used for business meetings and functions. There is a popular and busy bar/brasserie, but the dining room is now tucked away in the basement area and whilst well lit it, is not obvious where it is and not nearly so popular as the ground floor spaces. Groups such as Starwood have discovered the benefits of making restaurants fashionable areas within their hotels, providing perches for ‘Friday Night Millionaires’ to pose, see and be seen. The location of the restaurant here turns dining into a functional activity rather than the social event that is evident in the way the bar space works, and it fails to attract diners in the very competitive restaurant scene in Leeds. The ballroom and other function rooms retain original features that add to their glamour and the historic buildings people have rightly insisted on the preservation of the plaster details throughout. These details echo the architectural details to be seen on the outside of the building, but despite all this conservation to my mind the areas with the strongest echoes of the 1930’s are the staircases at either end of the building, with their strange elongated windows and their decorative metalwork. The designers have sought to empathise with the original intent and recreate something of the feel of the original hotel.
	Original features survive in some instances
In the bedroom corridors this intent is noticeable through the styling of the new doors. Their decoration is almost restrained when compared with the decoration and plasterwork of the original and there are glimpses of this glory elsewhere in the hotel. The whole makes an interesting comparison with the Hotel Elephant in Weimar, built at the same time and with a contemporaneous interior. The gold and brown colouring used here was a feature of the original scheme, much of which probably disappeared when the hotel was owned by the then state railway, British Railways. The original descriptions of the interior strikes an interesting note by comparison with contemporary interiors. The leather lined conference room shown in the images in our recent article on the refurbishment of London's Intercontinental Park Lane for example echo the goatskin leather panelling of the original conference room here from 1937, where the leather was used as a sound deadening element as well as a decorative feature

Queens Hotel

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