Jenners Building Hotel Conversion, Princes Street, Edinburgh

Jenners traded on Princes Street for 183 years and then stopped. The store closed in 2021, months after a fire tore through part of the building, and the Category A-listed pile that William Hamilton Beattie finished in 1895 has been a construction site ever since. AAA United, the Danish holding company owned by Anders Holch Povlsen, bought it in 2017 and is turning it into a 90-room hotel with retail and food and beverage on the lower floors. David Chipperfield Architects leads the design, 3DReid handles the hospitality fit, and GRAHAM holds the shell-and-core contract.

Project Scope

The building runs to roughly 17,500 square metres across ten floors, assembled in at least three campaigns: Beattie’s 1895 store, a 1903 extension, and further additions in the 1950s and 1960s. Reconciling those floor plates is most of the job. Months of soft strip preceded GRAHAM’s appointment. The centrepiece is the three-storey top-lit grand saloon, which is being restored as a publicly accessible room serving both the retained retail floors and the hotel above. On the Princes Street elevation, Beattie’s carved caryatids need specialist stone conservation; he put them there as a tribute to the women who kept the store trading. Site logistics are unforgiving. There’s no lay-down area, the tram line runs directly outside, and the whole thing sits inside the Edinburgh Old and New Towns World Heritage Site. Completion is targeted for 2027. The contract value hasn’t been published.

Why It Matters

Scotland loses department stores faster than it finds new uses for them, and the usual answer is a gutted shell behind a retained facade. This isn’t that. Keeping the grand saloon open to the public, rather than absorbing it into a hotel lobby with a reception desk in the middle, is the decision the scheme will be judged on. It also tests whether a heritage conversion can carry a 90-key hotel’s plant, riser and acoustic requirements through a building whose structure was designed for haberdashery counters. Get it right and Princes Street keeps a working landmark instead of a preserved one.

Project Team & Details