Douglas Wallace

29 June, 2010

Europe’s first Turkish bath was opened in 1856 near Blarney, County Cork, and such baths became so popular in Ireland that they are still known today in Germany as ‘Roman-Irish baths’.

It’s very fitting, then, that one of Europe’s leading designers of spas and luxury spa hotels is Dublin- based practice Douglas Wallace. With another office in London, it has won a clutch of awards for the spas it has created over the past 20 years.

Hugh Wallace, founder-director of the firm, was destined to design spas. Graduating in architecture from Dublin’s Trinity College in 1980, he immediately set up in practice with his then business partner Alan Douglas, a conservation architect. In his own words, Wallace “went straight from college into designing a hotel project in Co Wexford – a 26-bedroom hotel right on the harbour where the clientele was largely local truck drivers and their families waiting to take the ferry to the UK.”

In Ireland in the Eighties, there was no architectural work, only interior design, he says, and that led to designing health centres. “Every three-star hotel had a health centre, swimming pool and gym, and by the late Nineties that had evolved into spas. There was no financial analysis as to how they would work.

“Operating a spa is quite a different business to running a hotel. So a lot of these spas were being put in, but not in the right places. But get it right – like the Seafield Golf and Spa Hotel in Wexford – and the spa becomes a destination in its own right, and a huge income generator. Seafield is fabulous, a real treat for dealing with stress – and not just for a massage, but for real remedies too.”

Most spas worldwide are operated by a brand as an adjunct to its own product range – such as the Six Senses, Temple and Kempinski spas featured in this Focus. Now British company Molton Brown has taken the plunge, and has opened its own day spas in Manchester and at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.

Douglas Wallace was commissioned to design the first in the chain, which opened in Manchester nearly two years ago, along with the design manual for the brand. With the prototype outlet and the design manual to hand, Molton Brown is rolling out the subsequent branches itself. “It’s looking at spas as a way of repositioning its products quite significantly in the short term, turning what was basically a low-end product – hand lotion and body washes – into a spa product,” explains Wallace.

Two years ago, the Celtic tiger that was Ireland after joining the EU had more than earned its stripes in the international business community. But last year the recession hit many businesses. Douglas Wallace was no exception, and last year went into liquidation. Wallace and his three fellow directors bought the company back from the liquidators and are now up and running again. But it was “a very traumatic year”, he admits.

So what’s next on the order books? The practice has just begun work on a project at Hammam Righa in Algeria to create a spa village, a medical spa where guests will go for treatment courses lasting up to 10 days, and a five-star destination spa. The complex will include 16 villas built around a hammam, each with a private hydrotherapy pool with water jets.

In complete contrast, the practice is also converting the old Exchange building in Liverpool into a luxury hotel, and designing the Crowne Plaza for London’s King’s Cross. The future is looking healthy.

Award wins
For the g hotel in Galway, Ireland, which the firm designed with milliner Philip Treacy (responsible for the furnishings), Douglas Wallace won the Design Award for Best Large Hotel in the Travel + Leisure magazine’s annual awards. In 2006, the E’Spa at the g won the Best Spa, Health and Leisure Project at the European Hotel Design Awards and the hotel won Best Hotel Design at FX’s International Interior Design Awards.

The Cliff House Hotel at Ardmore, Co Waterford was highly commended by the 2008 Irish Design Institute. Douglas Wallace also won a Strata Tiles competition for the UK’s most creative tile application for the new Kohler spa at the Old Course Hotel at St Andrews.