Dear Spurtle,

I was intrigued by the brief article about ‘resisting apart-hotels’ on page 1 of Issue 367 (‘Time to plug Planning gap?’).

My understanding is that, similarly to the position in England, an apart-hotel is not automatically classed as a hotel (Class 7 in Scotland) but will be so if it is operated like a hotel.

The article seemed to be saying that confusion over the use class was preventing people from waging an effective war against proposed apart-hotels. I wonder what the author had in mind – ordinary short-term lets (STLs) masquerading as ‘aparthotels’, or hotels claiming to be aparthotels? Surely it must be the former, as I doubt anyone could care so passionately about whether there is a kitchenette in the room or not.

So, assuming that what is considered objectionable is collections of short-term-letting units claiming to constitute a hotel-like operation, I can think of 2 examples:

• 13b-c & 15a Dundas Street — This seems to me to be a case where the owners have been ‘forced’ into this contortion by the perceived unfairness of being refused an STL licence for these STLs individually, despite them having their own front door, and the potential for nuisance to residential neighbours appearing quite low. In any case the Council is very much onto them and it’s not clear what other people ‘resisting’ would do to help the situation.
• 7 Baxter’s Place — This concerns the conversion of a former social club to STL / apart-hotel use. In today’s landscape, the deciding factor is whether there is loss of residential accommodation which, as the property was previously in commercial (social club) use, there is not. Whether or not the STL use is hotel-like seems to be neither here nor there.

To me, aparthotels are no more or less objectionable in a residential area than hotels. What I would say about hotels or apart-hotels involving small rooms and a high proportion of ‘wet’ spaces requiring drainage and mechanical ventilation, is that their location in Georgian-era buildings with well-proportioned rooms and of high architectural interest is often very problematic. We can see this with the current office to aparthotel proposals at 16–26 Forth Street, 10–12 South Charlotte Street, and 56–64 Frederick Street, where en-suite bathroom and kitchen pods in every room create drainage problems which the structure was never designed to accommodate, and where the architectural interest of the plan form of a Georgian building is lost in endless partitioning of rooms.

This is equally the case at 14–17 Atholl Crescent, which was a capsule hotel rather than apart-hotel development, and is equally not the case at 58 Albany Street, which is an office to hotel conversion not involving a historic building.

My take-away from the article in Issue 367 was that STL-operators are once again being criticised in vague terms for supposedly underhand behaviour. Meanwhile, the architectural heritage of our city is being trashed by inappropriate hotel and apart-hotel development. 

I have no dog in any fight against STLs but my sense of fairness is on the alert. Can we please clarify what they are being accused of?  

Caroline Roussot

Editor’s reply: The article in question emerged from a series of public and private discussions between individuals, ward councillors and community councillors over the summer and autumn. In some cases, these discussions were prompted by particular planning applications; in others, they responded to a sense that apart-hotels are being used as a way to create what are effectively short-term lets in places where licensed STLs would not be consented. Spurtle is also aware of, and has often reported, concerns that overprovision of temporary visitor accommodation is crowding out community uses and permanent homes during the city’s self-declared ‘housing emergency’.