Boutique hotel construction in Batumi: a new building or an old house

Boutique hotel construction in Batumi differs from an ordinary hotel in the order of work. First you decide what the hotel will be like for the guest: the rooms, the light, the view, the common areas. Then the architect and engineers lay out the frame and services to fit that idea.

How a boutique hotel differs from a mini-hotel in the design

The design of a mini-hotel is built on repetition: two or three room types, bathrooms in pairs by the risers, one specification for the whole room stock. In a boutique hotel the rooms are often all different: a corner room with a bay window, an attic room under the slope of the roof, a room opening onto the garden or a terrace. We work out each of these rooms individually, so the design and working drawings take longer and cost more per square metre.

Different rooms don't mean different services. We still bring the bathrooms together onto a few risers, even if in one room the shower stands by the window and in another behind a glass partition in the middle of the room. Sanitaryware, switches, locks and air conditioners come from one range for the whole hotel, so that spare parts fit every room.

A new building or an old house

A new building is simpler in terms of services and timing. We design the frame from the start around the rooms, the shafts and the storey heights. An old house gives you what is hard to build anew: thick stone walls, high ceilings, arches, timber staircases, a place in the old quarter. It also carries more risks. We name the budget for a hotel like this only after a survey.

An old house for a hotel: what we check before you buy

Old houses in central Batumi are often built with lime mortar, and they have timber floors and wiring that was never designed for a dozen air conditioners. How such a house is assessed part by part is described on the page about old house renovation. For a hotel, that assessment gets questions of its own:

• Will the floors carry rooms with bathrooms, tiles and people? For a hotel we usually replace the timber beams with cast-in-place concrete or steel floors, to the structural engineer's calculation.
• Where will the risers and ventilation run? You can't cut a shaft through a thick stone wall without a calculation, so the risers more often go into new boxed shafts by the internal walls.
• How will people get out in a fire? One narrow timber staircase for three floors of rooms may not be enough, and then a second staircase or a different layout is needed.
• Is the base of the house dry? Rooms in the semi-basement of an old house are the first to get damp, and we don't design them without waterproofing and drainage.

Before you pay a deposit, our partner lawyer checks the Public Registry extract and whether the house is listed as a cultural heritage monument. This decides what can be changed on the facade and inside. Adding a storey or making new openings in load-bearing walls is only done with a design and a permit; more on reconstruction in the section on construction stages and types of work.

The interior design comes before the working drawings

In a boutique hotel the interior decides where the services run. A bathtub in the middle of the room, a basin in a niche, a ceiling with no boxing, an exposed brick wall that can't be chased: all this has to be known before the structural engineer and the services engineers issue the working drawings. Our order is: first the concept for the rooms and common areas, then the architecture and services to suit it, then the estimate.

Rooms, the lobby and corridors are designed to the same rules as any hotel design: wall elevations, a specification, a check on a model room. What construction needs from this design is the set-out points: ceiling heights, the positions of water outlets, cables for wall lights and accent lighting, embedded fixings for heavy furniture and shelves. If the designer is yours, we meet them before the working drawings, not on site.

Facade, windows and a roof terrace

The facade of a boutique hotel is usually drawn for the specific house: stone cladding, timber shutters, wrought-iron balconies, large windows facing the sea. It is designed together with the architecture, as on the page about facade design. For us the main thing is that a beautiful detail stands up to wind-driven rain. We work out every junction of window, cornice and balcony in section.

The panoramic glazing of the rooms is thermally broken aluminium. How aluminium differs from uPVC by the sea is covered in our comparison of aluminium and uPVC windows. Sliding doors to the terrace get a sill and a channel in front of the threshold: otherwise, in wind-driven rain, water gets in under the door and ruins the floor of the room.

A roof terrace with a bar or sun loungers often becomes the hotel's main attraction. It needs waterproofing under the tiles, falls towards the outlets, a guardrail and access from the staircase, and the structural engineer designs the slab beneath it for people, furniture and planters full of soil.

Services the guest doesn't notice

A boutique hotel guest pays for quiet. How the building works is something they shouldn't see. The room air conditioners are more often ducted: the indoor unit sits above the ceiling of the entrance hall or bathroom, and only the grilles show in the room. The outdoor units are hidden on the roof or in a service yard. We put supply ventilation in every room, and in an old house with thick walls, without it, the corners get damp in winter.

Sound insulation is built into the structure: floating floors on the slabs, double partitions between rooms right up to the slab, risers in insulated boxing. In an old house with timber floors, quiet is hardest to achieve, and that is one more argument for new floors.

A boutique hotel needs a fire alarm with sounders and emergency lighting just as any hotel does. An old house needs particular care: the timber staircases, beams and panelling kept for their character are treated with a fire-retardant. Everything else for an old house, from a second staircase to the fire resistance of the floors, is set by the fire safety section of the design.

How much boutique hotel construction costs in Batumi

A turnkey boutique hotel in a new building costs from 3,120 to 3,840 ₾ per m². This price includes the frame, a facade to an individual design, panoramic glazing, hotel-grade building services, and finishes in the rooms and common areas to the interior design project. Furniture and decor are chosen separately, and the building design and the interior design project are also priced separately. An interior design project for the lobby, corridors and all the rooms costs from 110 ₾ per m², the design of one standard room with bathroom from 3,900 ₾, and a boutique hotel has more room types than an ordinary hotel.

The white frame of an ordinary house costs from 1,050 ₾ per m², and the difference goes into the facade, windows, services and finishes. A ventilated facade with porcelain tiles or composite panels costs from 420 ₾ per m² of facade, thermally broken aluminium windows from 780 ₾ per m² of glazing, supply and extract ventilation from 205 ₾ per m² of floor area, and a fire alarm from 17 ₾ per m².

The price goes up with a handmade stone facade, a roof terrace and rooms of which no two are alike. A new building on a level plot and two or three repeated room types come out cheaper. We send a preliminary estimate from photos of the plot or house and a concept sketch within 24 hours on business days; the final cost is set on the basis of the design, after a visit to the site and once the estimate is agreed.