Small hotel construction in Batumi

We approach small hotel construction in Batumi from the way the hotel will operate: how many rooms there are, who greets the guests, where the linen is washed and where the staff take the rubbish out. A building with 10–30 rooms can no longer be designed as a large guest house. A mini-hotel needs a reception desk, service rooms, central ventilation, a fire alarm with a warning system and emergency lighting.

Room stock: how many rooms, and what kind

A mini-hotel usually has two or three room types: a double with a large bed, a twin with two separate beds and a larger family room. There are no kitchens in the rooms, and this is the main difference from an aparthotel: the load on the electrical supply and the number of risers are lower, and the space an aparthotel gives over to kitchens goes into the rooms or a breakfast room here. The width of a standard room sets the column spacing, so the room is drawn before the structural engineer calculates the frame.

Rooms next to the lift shaft, above the kitchen and above the reception turn out to be the noisiest. At the concept stage we try to put a linen room, a storeroom or a service staircase in those places. The room itself, its furniture and its lighting are drawn in a hotel design project, which is best finished before the detailed design of the services: the sockets, outlets and service runs on site are positioned from it.

Three flows: guests, staff and linen

In a single day, a 20-room hotel sees guests with suitcases, housekeeping with trolleys, bags of dirty linen, breakfast supplies and rubbish. If all of this goes through one door, a guest at the desk at eight in the morning runs into bags of sheets. So at the concept stage we separate the flows:

• guests: an entrance from the street, a reception desk with a view of the door, a luggage room, the lift;
• staff and deliveries: a service entrance from the courtyard, a staff room with a toilet and lockers, a route to the kitchen that bypasses the dining room;
• linen: clean linen is kept in linen rooms on each floor, and dirty linen goes down the service staircase to the laundry or to the point where an outside laundry collects it;
• rubbish: a bin area by the service entrance that a vehicle can drive up to.

The lift carries both guests and the housekeepers' trolleys, so we choose a wider car than in a residential building. How sales, cleaning and the room standard are organised afterwards is described on the page about room stock management.

Kitchen and breakfast room

Breakfasts change the building more than the menu would suggest. The kitchen needs an extract taken up above the roof, a grease trap on the drains and a separate power circuit for the cookers and the dishwasher. If the cooking is on gas, we build the room to the gas utility's requirements, and the utility lays the pipe to it and connects it itself; we don't touch it. The dining room goes on the ground floor, with a way out to the courtyard or a terrace, so that the check-out queue at the desk doesn't stand among the tables.

For simple breakfasts of ready-prepared food, a servery with a sink and fridges is enough, without a hot kitchen. This has to be decided before the concept design: kitchen equipment is not included in the price of the building, and the openings for the extract and services are built into the floor slabs and the roof.

Ventilation, hot water and the noise of building services

By the sea the rooms are humid all year round, and in winter some of them stand closed, so in a mini-hotel we usually install supply and extract ventilation with heat recovery: supply air to the rooms, extraction from the bathrooms. With 15–30 rooms, a water heater in every bathroom takes up space and has to be serviced one at a time, so hot water is more often produced in the plant room, by a boiler or a heat pump with storage tanks, with circulation right up to the furthest room.

A hotel's building services make noise of their own, and at night guests hear it. We put the ventilation unit on the roof on anti-vibration mounts above a corridor or the staircase rather than above rooms, and fit silencers on the ducts. The laundry machines stand on anti-vibration mounts, and the pump room is kept away from the ground-floor rooms. We request the supply capacity from the electricity provider at the design stage, and decide with the designer which systems go on backup power.

Fire safety and evacuation

A hotel's fire safety design is broader than a house's. The designer checks it against, among other things, the technical regulation “On Fire Safety Rules and Conditions”, approved by Government Resolution No. 370 of 23 July 2015, and decides which of its provisions apply to your building. On site this usually means:

• an alarm with detectors in the rooms, corridors and plant rooms; for a hotel we recommend an addressable system, so that the control panel shows exactly which detector has gone off;
• a warning system for guests, emergency lighting and exit signs;
• fire doors on the stairwell, in the kitchen and in the plant rooms;
• escape routes without narrow points, and evacuation plans on every floor.

The number of staircases and exits, the fire resistance of the structure and the finishes on escape routes are set by the design, and we don't change them on site to save money.

Class of structure, permit and acceptance into use

A mini-hotel may fall into a higher class of structure than a private house, as we also point out on the page about construction in Batumi. The guide figures for floor area and height for each class are given on the page about commercial construction, and by those figures a 20-room hotel usually goes beyond Class II. The class determines the contents of the design package, the surveys and the application procedure, so we establish it before the layouts: the architect and our partner lawyer check the registry extract against the zoning rules.

When construction is finished, we help with the official acceptance of the building into use, if its class requires it, and with registering it in the Public Registry.

How to open the hotel in time for the season

We plan the construction schedule backwards from the opening date. The busiest months for Batumi hotels are July to September, so it makes sense to open before July. We aim to complete the frame and roof before the autumn rains, do the facade and services over the winter and finish the rooms in spring. If the shell isn't closed in by winter, it is more honest to move the opening back a year straight away than to finish rooms inside walls that haven't dried out.

We start finishing the room stock with a model room, as in hotel room renovation: you inspect it on site or by video call, and only after your comments do the crews move on to the rest. Before handover we carry out commissioning: the ventilation, hot water with all the showers on a floor running at once, the alarm, the locks and the emergency lighting.

How much it costs to build a small hotel in Batumi

A turnkey mini-hotel with 10–30 rooms costs from 2,220 ₾ per m² of total floor area. This includes the cast-in-place concrete frame, the facade, ventilation, a fire alarm and emergency lighting, and the finishing of the rooms with their bathrooms, the corridors and the reception. Furniture, textiles and kitchen equipment are priced separately. So is the design: with all sections, including fire safety, it costs 125–170 ₾ per m², and a hotel design project for the lobby, corridors and rooms 110–160 ₾ per m².

If you build in stages, the shell of a 3–5 storey building costs from 900 ₾ per m², and white frame, with the facade and windows already in and the services brought up to the rooms, from 1,380 ₾. Of the hotel building services, the most noticeable item is supply and extract ventilation, at 205–300 ₾ per m², while a fire alarm, installed, costs 17–24 ₾ per m². The price goes up with a kitchen with a hot section, a basement or car park, VRF air conditioning and a cramped plot in the centre, and comes down with repeated floors with one or two room types.

We send a preliminary estimate based on photos of the plot and a sketch or floor plan within 24 hours on business days. The final cost is set on the basis of the design, after a visit to the plot and once the estimate is agreed.