Seventy rooms at Peppers Beach Club & Spa, Palm Cove, back to guests a week at a time

Three stages, seventy keys

The job came in three stages. Stage 1 was 26 keys over November and December 2023, Stage 2A was 21 keys in February and March 2024, and Stage 2B was the last 23 in April and May. Spa rooms, one-bedroom lagoon suites, garden spa rooms and two-bedroom suites, most of them lock-off pairs.

A room back every week

Rooms went out of service in batches of about eight. Three or four days of rough-in, two days of fit-off, and the batch was ready to hand back, usually within a week of being taken out. A crew of five or six worked it in business hours, so the resort around them carried on as normal.

That rhythm is what a resort actually needs from a refurbishment. A room out of service costs money every night it stays out, and a programme that returns rooms on a steady weekly cycle is one the front desk can sell around.

What went into each room

• Clipsal Iconic switches and power points, in black and in vivid white
• More than a hundred dual USB power points through the rooms
• Fan control, a twin data point and power for reading lights at each bedhead
• Television power and cabling chased in behind wall-mounted TVs, brackets supplied
• Spa joinery with recessed shelf lighting on its own switch
• Dimmable tri-colour LED downlights, fire-rated wherever the ceiling called for it
• A four-spot light bar over the kitchen bench in place of the old surface fittings

Pricing what you cannot count yet

No two rooms had the same number of downlights, and nobody could say how many each would need until the ceilings were opened up. So the downlights were priced per fitting, with a set allowance for a fire-rated fitting wherever one was required. Accor paid for what each room actually took, and nobody had to guess seventy times over.

Stage 1 was also revised to take the chasing out of the second bedrooms.