New project

One of Britain’s leading tourist attractions has announced plans for an energy-effiient hotel, a San Francisco-based start-up takes plastic bottles destined for landfill sites and turns them into stylish footwear, while window solar blinds track the sun to generate electricity.

- Steve Hill

SELF-SUSTAINING COMMUNITY

The Eden Project, a leading British tourist attraction thanks to its biomes which house an indoor rainforest and a vast collection of plants, has announced plans for an energy-effiient Dhs40 million hotel.

Due to be completed in April 2018, it has been designed by Tate Harmer, who first collaborated with the Eden Project in 2011 on the Rainforest Canopy Walkway.

The hotel will comprise 109 naturally ventilated suites, a restaurant and event spaces for weddings and concerts, along with education rooms that will support Eden Project’s apprentice scheme and degree-level courses.

Slats of locally sourced timber and blocks of stone will cover the façade of the hotel which will be split across three- and four-storey blocks, connected by a central axis that will feature existing oak and sycamore trees plus Cornish hedgerows.

The hotel will welcome some of the project’s one million-plus annual visitors and, according to Tate Harmer, “will sit sensitively within the Cornish countryside and offer high standards of accessibility, energy effiiency and sustainability.”

Jerry Tate, partner at Tate Harmer, said: “This building is a unique response to its local Cornish context and the philosophy of the Eden Project. Landscape is at the heart of the scheme.”

David Harland, Eden Project Executive Director, added: “We feel the design is eye-catching but in keeping with its surroundings, and we’re proud to say that it will be built to the highest environmental standards.”

More than 18 million people have visited the Eden Project, in the south-west English county of Cornwall, since it opened in 2001.

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