Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel, South Cerney, United Kingdom

The privately owned Oxfordshire-based Four Pillars Hotel group opened their new 234 room hotel in August 2007. They include apartment suites, eight rooms with facilities for the disabled and two honeymoon suites. All of the rooms and suites are fully air conditioned with free broadband and free TV film channels and many have full height windows for the view over the lake. The rooms and suites are all named after water birds, for example, swan suites, moorhen, grebe and mallard rooms. The rooms are decorated in a beige, birch and blue decor.

The new 1,800m² hotel is situated in Britain's largest water park of 133 lakes and has a capacity for conferences of 400 delegates, with additional space for a 400 seat marquee if required. The two floor lodge-style hotel was constructed on a 45 acre site that will maximises its lakeside views through its feature glass walls and verandas. There is also a 190 seat restaurant as well as 35 seats on a veranda overlooking the lake and an 85 seat lounge bar. The hotel is set in an unrivalled tranquil lakeside setting, yet close to major motorway access – only 1.5 hours from London, and so an ideal location for conferences.

CONFERENCING

The hotel is particularly geared towards meeting the needs of business travellers, major conferences and corporate events and also offers state of the art conference and AV equipment including video wall and surround sound system and recording equipment, as well as complimentary wireless internet access. Corporate or incentive evenings are also a speciality of the hotel, with a dedicated team to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Charles Holmes, the chief executive of Four Pillars Hotels, commented: 'Where business customers are concerned, hotels often feel they have to offer gimmicks because they don’t get the simple things right. If a customer wants dinner served in their room in 25 minutes – that’s precisely what we’ll do. They operate in a "now" culture. The most important thing for them is that we do the simple things well and quickly and with minimum fuss.'

FACILITIES

The Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel includes a health spa called Spa 6, leisure club and gastro pub. As it is situated in the Cotswold Water Park it also hosts a selection of outdoor water activities such as sailing, jet skiing and water skiing, kayaking, dragon boat racing and windsurfing. There are also a wide range of land-based activities available including cycling, abseiling, quads, high ropes and golf.

The 10,000ft² health spa and leisure club provides a retreat centre for guests, with seven treatment rooms offering therapies such as massage, Rasul mud therapy, spray tanning, manicures and pedicures. Spa-goers are be able to treat themselves to experience showers which can be set to simulate different rainforest environments, or try out invigorating bucket showers. Facilities include an 11m pool with mood enhancing lighting and hydrotherapy jets, a hydro pool, a flotation room, relaxation room/lounge serving drinks and herbal tea, herbal sauna, crystal steam room, Payot beauty and wellbeing treatments and a high specification multi-gym.

APARTMENTS

The hotel features 27 two- and three-bedroom luxury apartments with more planned, which businesses can buy as corporate incentive schemes and also as a base for overseas and travelling staff. A number of apartments were purchased via a scheme, enabling the owner to lease the apartment back to the hotel for a guaranteed income, yet still use it themselves for 28 days a year.

DESIGN FEATURES

Ultra-modern design has been incorporated throughout the hotel by using natural materials, including large expanses of wooden flooring, huge glass walls and terraces to maximise and blend with the lakeside views. The building uses Cotswold stone in the construction of the building and also cedar wood cladding on the facade to lend an alpine lodge appearance to the hotel.

CONTRACTORS AND DEVELOPERS

The Cotswold Water Park Resort was a joint project by Four Pillars Hotels and Oxfordshire-based building firm Builders Ede, and was supported by HSBC Bank plc.

The heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system was from Honeywell and was installed by P A Collacott and Co Partners of CentraLine, a subsidiary of Honeywell. The building management system is a PC-based SymmetrE system from Honeywell. The system controls all of the heating and ventilation and can set the environment for each of the guest rooms and meeting rooms. The HVAC plant is controlled by five Honeywell Excel Controllers in plant rooms situated across the hotel. The PC control uses a LonWorks open network.

Alcatel-Lucent provided their OmniPCX Enterprise platform IP telephony system for the hotel. The installation was carried out by NextiraOne UK and provides guest rooms with features such as voicemail and wake-up services and also provides the staff with improved internal communications (hotel managers have DECT handsets so they can remain in contract throughout the hotel).

The Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel is the fifth hotel that local developers and entrepreneurs Brian Murtagh, chairman of Four Pillars Hotels and Jonathan Ede, managing director of Builders Ede, have built together.

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