NEWS

Contractor Wins Praise as Dakota Opens its Doors
1 October 2006

Dakota Hotel chain praises Dawn Construction as their Scottish flagship hotel opens.

The partnership developed during Dawn’s design and build contract for the £11.4m, 92-room Dakota Eurocentral Hotel and the adjacent 44,000 sqft of office space.

Bruce Robertson, operations manager for the hotels company, was unstinting in his admiration for the construction firm. “I can’t sing their praises highly enough. Everyone on the team – from Divisional Manager Jim Johnstone to Alan Macdonald (chairman of Dawn Group) – has been terrific. They have a tremendous work-rate and we’ve found their craftsmanship is second to none,” says Roberston as he enjoys a coffee break in the uber stylish bar / grill area of the black building which stands just off the east-bound M8 about 10 minutes outside Glasgow.

Jim Johnstone, Divisional Manager for Dawn Construction, was equally impressed with the “first date” between client and contractor. “They’re a very interesting client and one I would most certainly like to work with again.”

Eurocentral is the first of the Dakota Hotel chain to open in Scotland. It’s a joint venture concept created by Glaswegian hotelier Ken McCulloch (the man responsible for the city’s original One Devonshire Hotel and the Malmaison chain, among others) and Formula One driver David Coulthard. The first Dakota Hotel opened in Nottingham in 2004 and work is due to be completed in March 2007 on the third, a 132-room facility in South Queensferry with views across the Forth Road Bridge. The aim is to open more than 40 sites by 2011, including a further site in Glasgow’s city centre, and inward investment of up to £100m has been guaranteed over the next two years.

Glaswegian born-and-bred Robertson says the company’s goal is to ensure each hotel is different from the last and claims that it’s Dawn’s attention to detail – and it’s ability to work alongside interior designer Amanda Rosa Interiors – that guaranteed the smooth running of it’s inaugural Scottish site.

“Contractors are in their element when they’re working with concrete and steel but when it comes to achieving the finishes and level of detail we look for, that’s the real challenge for us – especially if it’s the first project we’re doing with a contractor” he explains. “But Dawn worked with Amanda’s team beautifully and really made every effort to get us the detail we wanted.”

The biggest challenge for Dawn was re-programming to allow last-minute changes. “We do change things quite late” admits Roberston. “We made modifications to the ground floor area only four or five weeks before the opening (to introduce private dining rooms in the grill and changed meeting areas to the gym and some back-of-house works) so we had to get the building warrant altered. And to credit Dawn they’d already completed those works and had to pull them down again to get round it.” He acknowledges that these are self-inflicted pressures but adds that Dawn’s resilient attitude ensured that the project still completed on time. “If it was an old-fashioned environment with the client and contractor sort of hitting back at each other all the time it wouldn’t have been as successful as it’s become. Dawn really wanted to learn as much out of this as we have, in terms of hopefully working together at some stage in the future.”