The Royal Hotel is a new hospitality offering in an old 19th C. landmark structure at the center of Picton, Ontario.

INNOVATION
With only 28 rooms, the hotel is defined by its street to garden ground floor whose restaurants and bars innovatively expand and contract according to the season and public and private events. It is designed to be a transporting experience while deeply rooted in the local context. The main parts of the Victorian hotel are disassembled, abstracted, then reassembled in situ creating a multivalent hospitality experience that benefits from the charged royal contrast between ‘genteel’ and ‘real’ elements. The main dining room’s quintessential ceiling rosette is now a grand mushroom; the Victorian elevator cage is substituted with construction-grade expanded metal; and the traditional fireplace mantles are displaced by furled, delaminated plaster and wood, to name a few.

FUNCTIONALITY
The original Victorian structure is reduced at the upper suite floors to allow north and west facing suites to benefit from an abundance of light, while the public main floor is opened up to span from the front sidewalk to a rear porch, garden, and pool. It is at the ground level where a complex but relaxed arrangement of hospitality offerings allows the general public, alongside hotel guests, to enjoy eating drinking, and gathering in various spaces served by a strategically positioned multivalent kitchen. The street-front Counter Bar, and the rear-facing Restaurant that spills out onto a restaurant porch are complemented by the more intimate hotel Parlour, Library, and outdoor Garden along the east bank of ground level experience to create parallel, simultaneous hospitality scenarios.

CREATIVITY
Also instrumental is the petrification of textiles whose patterns and details are rooted in the Victorian era, now expressed in stone, wood, and metal. The Restaurant dining room was designed for clever flexibility to shrink in low season without looking empty, and to open up and expand to almost double its size to the exterior porch and garden in warm weather. It is instrumental in connecting the convivial exterior component to the interior hotel and therefor was conceived of using exterior-like materials with combed plaster, glazed tiles, and wood board ceiling. The entire experience is punctuated by four bars that are also convertible depending on the time of day, time of week, and time of year.

SUSTAINABILITY
The Royal repurposes a derelict but heritage protected 19th C. Victorian Mercantile building through a process of surgical restoration and state-of-the-art upgrades in building envelope to exponentially improve the structure’s energy efficiency. The project breathes new life into the vintage structure and allows new interior interventions to work with building environmental systems to increase R-value and fresh air exchange. New windows are custom designed to emulate the original windows but now with high-performance glazing and seals.