July 28, 2006

Hotel Construction

Gazette building makes headlines

IRWIN RAPOPORT

correspondent

MONTREAL

A new 20-storey hotel will straddle the border of downtown Montreal and Old Montreal in 2008 when Atlific Hotels & Resorts opens up a high-end luxury hotel that combines a modern structure with three retrofitted buildings.

Montreal-based Atlific purchased the old Gazette printing plant, two office buildings and a vacant parking lot from the Societe de developpement de Montreal in 2005 for $10 million.

Already, the parking lot is being excavated and the three buildings — the Gazette building, constructed in the 1950s; an art deco office building, built in 1930; and an empire-style office building, built in 1899 — are being prepared for renovations.

“They’ve begun digging the hole where the tower will be,” said John C. Dunn, Atlific’s vice president, sales & marketing. “They will be going six storeys down for the underground parking. That will take about seven months to complete.”

The excavation work is managed by Delsan — AIM Demolition, while Atlific will handle the construction and renovations in-house.

ATLIFIC

A new hotel is being constructed in downtown Montreal, utilizing the old Gazette building.

Geiger-Huot Architects are working on the design on the tower and Gazette buildings.

“These buildings have been empty for years and that whole corridor has been transformed into the Quartier international de Montréal over the last few years,” said Dunn. “This is the last corner to be developed. The city wanted to make sure the property was not broken up and the right vocation was going into the buildings and that the architectural integrity was going to be maintained.”

While Dunn says the $10 million price tag was a fair deal, he admits there is quite a bit of engineering to be done.

“The facades of the historical buildings need to be fixed up; the mortar and roofing has to be redone; and the windows need to be replaced with modern, energy efficient ones, yet designed to keep the historical context of the buildings.”

The key element to the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is the 20-storey tower where the majority of the 431 hotel rooms will be located.

This building will have six below-ground floors of parking, some commercial space and a street-level restaurant.

The seven-storey building, which housed the printing presses, will serve as the main entrance for the hotel.

“We’ll remove two of the large (40-feet high) windowed panels at each end of the building,” he explains. “This grand hall will be a real shock to people because there is nothing else like that in Montreal. The front desk is on this level. Escalators bring you to the second floor, a combination of retail and meeting space, that connects to the tower.”

The plan is to complete the tower in the fall of 2007 and be open for business in late fall 2008.

Dunn says the two office buildings will likely be set aside for just that, due to market demand in the neighbourhood.

“We’ll have three or four floors of office space in the Gazette building and a couple of floors of meeting space,” he said. “There will be about 100,000-square-feet of office space to rent.”

Atlific does not foresee any construction problems, especially since the parking lot was dug and then backfilled several decades ago.

There will also be a green aspect to the design.

“We’re trying to go as green as possible on this building because it is the right thing to do,” said Dunn. “Somebody has to make the move. The planet is not going in the right direction, so any little thing we can do makes a difference.”

The green aspects include:

• Buying steam from a steam plant at the nearby World Trade Centre, which will save energy costs and reduce HVAC infrastructure costs.

• Re-using heat from the laundry to re-heat rooms, water, etc.

• The use of efficient windows and solar panels where applicable.

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