CALQ is designing a rehabilitation and extension project for a former EMGP (Entrepôts des Magasins Généraux de Paris) building located in the Pont de Flandre park, to transform it into a 4* hotel programme under the HILTON brand comprising 92 rooms, two seminar rooms, a fitness centre and a restaurant/café.

The EMGP site has a particularly rich history in the industrial Paris of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Parisian entrepreneur Georges Tom Hainguerlot had four brick and millstone warehouses built on this site in the 1850s, with round-headed bays on the ground floor for loading and handling products. These warehouses became the property of the Entrepôts des Magasins Généraux de Paris (EMGP) company. They were used to store non-perishable foodstuffs, sugar and flour and alcohol until the 1960s. The complex had a railway connection via the inner ring road. Now owned by the Icade group, the former general shops were renovated in 2000-2001 to accommodate office space behind the preserved facades.

The rehabilitation of the B34 building by CALQ enables the value of Icade’s assets to be enhanced with a view to sustainability and durability. The agency developed the project around three key ideas: to enhance the heritage elements, to preserve part of the original wooden post-and-beam structure, to make the building accessible from the public space, and to change the building’s purpose.

The original building is made up of three bays, each topped by a gable roof. It has five floors and no basement. Its facades are made of stone and brick, its roofs of tiles. Its interior structure is composed of wooden posts and beams. The work of restoration and adaptation of the wooden structure requires specific know-how from the team of architects, as well as specialists to identify the wood, assess its structural condition and implement the necessary reinforcements and treatments on the preserved wooden structures. In order to meet the acoustic requirements of the hotel industry, the original wooden floors were replaced by concrete floors, which are thinner and more efficient. The facades have been preserved, cleaned and the windows replaced in the original spirit by thermo-lacquered aluminium joinery to improve acoustics and heat.

The surfaces have changed destination, and the new hotel project provides for the creation of a lobby on the ground floor, 92 rooms from the ground floor to the third floor, and a range of restaurants and seminar rooms on the ground floor.