Paramount Hotel

The Paramount Hotel has been developed from an existing heritage building, activating the already vibrant Paramount Studios. The existing building featured timber floors and Holmes Fire was requested to retain the heritage masonry façade and windows as part of the engineering assessment that exposed these as a feature for the proposed hotel rooms.

A complex fire engineering philosophy for the building was created, incorporating advanced occupant warning and custom alert systems, in addition to passive fire safety measures. These were required to meet the heritage requirements whilst complying with the Building Code. To retain and preserve the external façade and offer a feature to the modern adaptation, the design created internal winter gardens for each hotel room, as a method to manage the limited available natural light within the building. Glass walls, offering privacy between each internal winter garden, created a unique problem for fire protection and a performance based solution was designed to allow for wall wetting sprinklers, creating a compliant result that was un-obtrusive to the design intent and heritage factors within the design.

As a result of the fire engineering works, the vast majority of the original structure in the building was retained, with intelligent passive and active fire safety measures. Occupant safety and property protection requirements were significantly improved resulting in a successful outcome, offering a custom heritage upgrade forming a new fabric in Sydney’s architectural story.­