Daikin adds comfort to luxury hotel

UK: Daikin is providing more than 425kW of air conditioning capacity to London’s latest luxury hotel, the £40m M by Montcalm in Shoreditch.

Designed for five-star standards and boasting a Very Good BREEAM rating, the eye-catching building features 269 rooms over 17 floors.

Occupying a triangular site on City Road, the boutique hotel’s futuristic white tower features diagonal windows, bold angles and a pyramid roofline.

The hotel has a restaurant and cocktail bar on ground and mezzanine levels and a haute cuisine establishment on the 17th floor – both operated by Searcy’s. Also on the 17th floor is a sky bar with spectacular views. Other facilities include a spa, fitness centre, swimming pool, conference rooms and banqueting suites.

Guest comfort and system reliability are Montcalm Hotels’ key requirements when selecting air conditioning. It currently has Daikin VRV equipment as its primary comfort control systems in three other hotels – with another in the pipeline.

SGP Contracts, main contractor on the three-year development project, used in-house capability to install 41 Daikin VRV Heat Recovery compact condensing units, giving the hotel more than 425kW of air conditioning capacity. The outdoor units, mostly installed on the roof, deliver heating and cooling – and economically recover energy from warm areas to heat cooler parts of the building.

The heat recovery facility is particularly useful in economically offsetting solar gain which can result from the hotel’s unusual fenestration.

Apart from three concealed floor-standing fan coil units, air conditioning delivery throughout M’s guest rooms and public areas is provided by 433 ducted fan coil units of low or medium static pressure.

Public areas of the building are ventilated by 15 Daikin Heat Reclaim Ventilation units. With a combined capacity of 13,350m³ of fresh air per hour, these units balance indoor and outdoor temperatures and humidity levels.

Guest rooms are ventilated by a central air handling unit feeding the rear of the ducted fan coil units. The return flow is via bathroom vents.

Despite the hotel’s irregular exterior appearance, floors 5 to 15 are identical in plan. SGP’s building engineer Stanley Anie says this simplified the installation of air conditioning and other services. “We basically had to get one floor right, then just repeat the installation all the way up.”

M’s air conditioning control is integrated into a third party common touch pad controller for all ‘in room’ guest services. No equipment problems or guest complaints were reported in the first six months of operation.