Back in December, I posted about the Japanese restaurant Kei closing down because the hotel was getting renovated. Since then more details have come out on the project as well as renderings of the new facelifted hotel.
- The hotel’s ground floor will be converted to mall use and become a continuation of Salhiya Complex with a dedicated entrance on Shuhada street. There will be an additional 6 stores on the ground floor and 5 more on the mezzanine.
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The hotel entrance will still be on the ground floor but the hotel lobby will now be moved up higher into the building, possibly the rooftop.
- The entire building exterior will be redone. Although I’m a fan of the current retro exterior, the 40-year-old design does look dated and gloomy.
The project is expected to be completed sometime in 2022.
Thanks ChaoticTranquility
21 replies on “JW Marriott Renovation & Salhiya Expansion”
That’s a really elegant looking renovation, who is the designer?
It’s funny how they always show well-dressed, privileged people walking along the streets in these models when in reality it’s just the labours and poor expats who walk on the streets in Kuwait.
Also what’re they gonna do about the hideous building next to Marriott? It’s such an eyesore.
I agree, they even depicted renovating that neighbouring building in their rendering to the lower right, what a place it could be as it’s in such a prime location of Kuwait City! Why is renovation/restoration/reuse not a high priority in this part of the city?
renovating old buildings is sadly not a thing here. i watch House Hunters and this one episode in the UK the real estate person is showing a couple this beautiful apartment and then shes like this building was built in 1890 and i was like shit, I never thought of that but cities like NY, London, Paris etc.. its common for buildings to be over a hundred years old and they still look fantastic. Here buildings on my street that are less than 10 years old look like they’re about to get demolished.
That is one of the reasons why I commented on this post in the first place. Those adjacent buildings on Fahad Al Salem St. are only 50-70 years old!? I own a place in the U.K. which is c1900 Victorian and is completely liveable for many decades to come. Restoration is not that hard if you know what you are doing engineering’s do maintenance wise. There are architects and contractors in Kuwait today that are able to handle projects like these, such as the Sawaber complex which we saw was recently demolished and had so much potential. Such a shame for so many lost opportunities 🙁 But… this is sign of progress, as the owners of the JW Marriott will hopefully prove that restorations of existing buildings can be successful developments and have a sensitivity to their existing context.
engineering *and maintenance wise.
I don’t think its about restoration being hard, I think its because real estate value has risen so much that it wouldn’t make financial sense to renovate that building (or similar buildings). That building lies on Fahed al salem street and is like 2 stories high, imagine the size of the tower that you could build there and how much money that would generate over a 2 story building. I think that’s why they aren’t being renovated and the owner might just be waiting for the right price to sell the plot.
Why would there be a lobby on the rooftop?! It makes no sense!
It’s actually a thing having hotels start somewhere up the building and not necessarily the ground floor, especially in cities with skyscrapers. I’ve stayed at a hotel once that started halfway up the building.
I prefer the lobby on the top floor, it gives you a pretty view, extra light and a nicer lobby café.
I think the fourseasons gave the hotel industry a boost, it feels special and cosy while the older ones seem meh and cold compared to it. I think alot of “top” hotels (sheraton etc.) lost alot of their clientele to the fourseasons so they had to redesign themselves to win them back. Honestly the Sheraton and JW aged badly, the only reason they did so well was the lack of competition.
A little off-topic, Mark. I’ve been having issues accessing your blog lately. Is it because I’m outside Kuwait? I get messages that the website is being protected from DDoS attacks?
Hey if you’re outside Kuwait yes, if you’re inside Kuwait, then it’s business as usual.
Someone threatened to DDoS the blog if I didn’t pay them. Obviously didn’t want to pay them and figured even if they did crash the blog it would be like a vacation for me so I ignored them. Ended up getting nearly 700 million attacks over the past 3 days lol.
But, I send all my traffic through Cloudflare and every section of the blog is hosted on a different server so it’s not easy to take the blog offline completely.
In Kuwait the blog hasn’t been down since I found out about the attack. If you’re outside Kuwait it depends which country you’re in but if Cloudflare sees a few million attacks coming from a specific country, I’m having them block that country completely temporarily. Users in Kuwait make up over 90% of my traffic so Kuwait is my priority and the blog has been up here.
Top 5 countries bots were located in and the number of attacks that came from them:
Indonesia 68,342,781
India 61,087,898
United States 53,107,203
Ukraine 47,558,725
Mexico 40,212,075
More data:
Total Requests: 698.39 Million
Total Bandwith: 6.16 TB
567,904,825 Malicious Requests Blocked
Why in the world did they try and hold you blog hostage??
🤷🏼♂️
Jesus. Interesting – I’m in Hungary and I couldn’t get on the site either.
yeah depending on where the attack was coming on I’ve set it to completely block that country and then reopen again after a set amount of time.
Anyone know what they’re doing with Safir Hotel in Bneid Al Gar?
I’ve been asking the same forever and still can’t get an answer!