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This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
CitizenM doesn't build hotels: it manufactures them. Each of the 192 rooms at its new London hotel, open in July, was prefabricated in a factory near Luton, transported on trucks down to the Bankside site, then stacked on top of each other. "The rooms are 99 percent finished at the factory," says Rob Wageman, principal at Concrete Architectural Associates, which designs the hotels. "The sheets are not on the beds, but everything else is in. All we do is clean them, make the beds and connect them to electricity and water."
The modular design means CitizenM is applying lean manufacturing to the hospitality business: "We have way less waste, and we know the number of hotels we're planning to open so can build rooms in huge numbers," says <span class="s2">Wageman. "That allows us to keep the price of production low."
CitizenM started in 2007 with a simple philosophy. "We did not set out to create a hotel. If you do that there are all kinds of rules. So we started with the room."
The company assembled two hotels in Amsterdam in 2008 "to experiment", then applied the lessons learned to create a new iteration in Glasgow (pictured) in 2010. CitizenM has stockpiled enough rooms for three new hotels in the UK, including Bankside.
Each requires a traditionally built foundation and first floor, but once a site is prepared, construction takes only eight months.
Next, CitizenM is targeting New York. Wageman isn't fazed by the maze of local regulations: "We are the boss of our own boxes."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
