CitizenM doesn't build hotels: it manufactures them. Each of the 192 rooms at its new London hotel, open in July, was prefabricated in a factory near Luton, transported on trucks down to the Bankside site, then stacked on top of each other. "The rooms are 99 percent finished at the factory," says Rob Wageman, principal at Concrete Architectural Associates, which designs the hotels. "The sheets are not on the beds, but everything else is in. All we do is clean them, make the beds and connect them to electricity and water."
The modular design means CitizenM is applying lean manufacturing to the hospitality business: "We have way less waste, and we know the number of hotels we're planning to open so can build rooms in huge numbers," says Wageman. "That allows us to keep the price of production low."
By: Tom Cheshire, Edited by: Ian Steadman
Continue reading...Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/08/play/hotels-that-arrive-prebuilt
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