Work is due to start in 2020 on a six-storey hotel for fashionable millennials just yards from Plymouth’s waterfront.
Dutch-based Vastint Hospitality has permission to put a 175-bedroom hotel, seven houses and seven studio apartments for short-term rent, on what is now the Pavilions car park close to the docks at Millbay – an area undergoing vast regeneration.
Vastint has now applied to Plymouth City Council to increase the number of rooms in the hotel to 200 and to update the design. Ascent has yet to be received.
Nevertheless Vastint said: “Construction is scheduled to start in 2020.”
The hotel will be operated under the Marriott group’s Moxy Brand and will be a major element of the £2.9million Millbay Boulevard scheme to create a new link between Plymouth city centre and waterfront.
Vastint acquired the car park at the Pavilions leisure complex from former Plymouth Argyle chairman James Brent’s Natatomisam company in early 2018.
The Moxy brand of hotel is aimed at fashionable millennials, with Keppie Design, on behalf of international real estate organisation Vastint Hospitality, describing Moxy Hotels as “three-star lifestyle hotels, offering affordable luxury to guests with a vibrant, young spirit at heart”. It would have a restaurant and bar.
Vastint said: “The hotel ground floor will accommodate the reception, public hospitality and back-of house facilities and plant.
“Floors 1 to 5 will house modular bedrooms and linen rooms. Besides the hotel, Vastint Hospitality will also develop a number of residential and extended stay units in a later stage.”
Vastint already has consent for seven, three-bedroom townhouses and seven extended stay three- or four-bed residential homes.
These extended stay studio units could be let for “short (days) to medium term (months)”, the firm said.
Vastint said the hotel project “provides a truly exciting opportunity to develop a prominent boulevard fronting site at the heart of the Millbay Boulevard Masterplan”.
The £2.9m Millbay Boulevard project has already seen the removal of the Two Trees pub, the Union Street footbridge and The Hub music venue to allow the redevelopment of Bath Street alongside the Pavilions.
The Millbay area is changing dramatically with new blocks of homes overlooking the docks, the Plymouth School of Creative Arts being established and shops, restaurants and hotels all expected to open.
Bath Street is being widened to create the new boulevard and there will be a new public square.
The area was once blighted by dereliction and prostitution but is being transformed into a chic waterfront area.
Near the site of the proposed Moxy hotel there it is planned to build an 11-storey skyscraper containing a hotel, shops and leisure outlets and a block of 58 apartments.
Plymouth City Council has bought the lease, for an undisclosed sum, on land at East Quay, Millbay, currently used as a temporary car park.
The idea is to jump-start development of a planned tower, part of the wider redevelopment of the Millbay docks area, which would see an 11-floor apartment block constructed next to a seven-storey hotel.
The overall development would also include about eight shops or restaurants, possibly set in a series of pitched-roofed spaces next to the waterfront.
There is also planning permission for 60 underground parking spaces and about eight shops or restaurants.
Nearby, Quadrant Wharf, a development of two six-storey blocks of flats and a row of a la mode town houses at West Hoe, is nearing completion.
The new phase sits next to Quadrant Quay, the 102-home block completed in 2015, and will look similar yet different enough to be distinct, particularly as some of it will be a “rustic bronze colour”.
Neighbouring East Quay, a multi-million pound block of retirement flats is on course for completion in 2020 bringing 150 jobs to the city.
The charitable Abbeyfield Society is constructing Mayflower Court, an 80-apartment development opposite the Millbay quayside – and it will also include a cinema, bar and even roof-top garden.
Since 2006 the Millbay area has seen creation of blocks of quality homes overlooking the docks, a new school, and shops and restaurants are opening up.
