First modular hotel in New Zealand nears completion in central Christchurch

Tuesday, 14 May 2019

The hotel, on the corner of Colombo and Salisbury streets, has taken more than 12 years of planning and construction.

New Zealand's first modular hotel will be finished next month, bringing a 12-year journey by its owners to a conclusion.

The 80-room hotel, at the corner of Colombo and Salisbury streets in central Christchurch, will be run as the Arden Hotel by operators Golden Grand Trading.

Construction under way in 2018 as the Vietnamese-made modules were pieced together, Lego-style.

The hotel has been built using 17 metre-long double room and corridor modules made in a factory in Vietnam. The modules included all fixtures, fittings and furniture, right down to bathrooms and painting.

After a four-week sea journey the modules were stored and later slotted together on site by crane, Lego-style. Only the electrical cabling was sourced in New Zealand.

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A crane lifts modules into place as the hotel takes shape.

Gary Le Pine – the director of Lepdon Holdings, which owns the hotel – said it was 'bloody wonderful' to be nearing completion at last and have an operator signed up.

Golden Grand Trading, owned by headed by Murali (Danny) Kodoor of Auckland, has taken a 15-year lease with rights of renewal.

A 2017 artist's impression of what would have been the Ramada Encore hotel on the site.

Kodoor said they were 'excited to be part of this landmark and innovative project', which had 'brought international technology to Christchurch'.

Lepdon Holdings bought the site in 2007 and battled through the credit crunch, property downturn, earthquakes, rising construction costs, consenting issues, and an uncertain rebuild market to complete its project.

Rental car business Europcar and a row of restaurants occupied the site 12 years ago.

It searched Asia to find a prefab manufacturer that was suitable.

When the modules did arrive, consenting delays meant they suffered damage and had to be repaired.

While the modular construction had saved 10 to 20 per cent compared with traditional construction methods, the unusual method made consenting difficult and the project had taken much longer than expected, Le Pine said.

'To be where we are now, this is a weight off our shoulders.'

The company originally planned to build a $22 million pre-fabricated modular apartment-style hotel called Living Cosa on the land in 2008 and run it itself.

After striking the global credit crunch, it reworked the plan into a $20m building with smaller, three-star rooms, which it hoped to build by 2010.

After a lull, the Wyndham hotel group announced in 2017 that in a new franchise deal with Lepdon Holdings, it would open a $15m, 77-room five-storey Ramada Encore Hotel on the site.

Later that year, with work already under way on the site, Lepdon offered the building for sale as a finished item, with buyers to either make their own arrangements of take up the agreement with Wyndham.

The hotel did not sell and the owners pushed on with construction last year.

Golden Grand Trading will be the main tenant and sublease some of the ground floor space for a restaurant and bar.

Nick Thompson, of real estate firm Bayleys, which brokered the lease, said the deal showed there was 'still plenty of capacity' in Christchurch's hotel market.

From 3900 hotel rooms before the earthquakes and 100 immediately afterwards, the city now has about 2700 rooms with another 400 planned to be ready in the next 12 months.

Le Pine is also director of TLC Ltd, which is in the planning stages of building modular hotels in Queenstown, Auckland, Tekapo and Napier.