Рет қаралды 715
A few doors down from the Four Points hotel is Towers Rotana, which in many ways was the older sibling to the Rose Rayhaan hotel across the highway, though unlike that one this was a "wet" establishment, featuring a sports bar and with wine and sake pairings being offered in its third-floor restaurant. It is also the fourth and second oldest remaining establishment of Rotana Hotel Management Corproration in Dubai, after Rimal (now J5 Rimal), Al Bustan (now Mövenpick Al Bustan), and Jumeira Rotana hotels.
The hotel occupied a 32-floor building, which in terms of building layout and floorplate design presumably formed the basis for the Rose Rayhaan. The building's basement was occupied by a bar called Long's (an evident homage to the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore), which reportedly features the longest bar counter in the Middle East, as well as storage areas and back offices. The ground floor had a lounge called Wraps other than the reception and the set of stairs leading down to the basement bar. The mezzanine level had mechanical rooms and thus not served by the passenger elevators, and the first floor had the hotel's administration offices. The second floor had a buffet restaurant named Flavours and a boardroom alongside the main kitchen, while a fusion-cuisine restaurant called Teatro and a bridge connecting the building to the fourth floor of the parking garage at the back of the building were on the third floor. (This bridge was not in use however, and guests were directed to exit the building on the ground floor and walk around to the back to get to the garage instead.) The fourth floor had multiple banquet rooms, while the fifth floor was another mechanical floor skipped by the main elevators. Accommodations were located on floors 6 and above, some of which were multi-bedroom apartments with full kitchens. The executive-floor lounge could also be found on the 24th floor. Parking was provided in the aforementioned 6-floor garage at the back of the hotel building, with an open-air swimming pool and fitness club called Bodylines (the health club brand shared among all Rotana properties) on its top level.
The hotel building had four passenger elevators, three room service elevators, and one (presumably hydraulic) kitchen service elevator, all supplied by Mitsubishi. The set of four passenger cars featured in this video were some of the last Mitsubishi's original GPM series elevators to be installed, as the succeeding GPM-3 series had already been released at the time this building was completed; the older rectangular buttons and the mechanical bell (which presumably had been available as a budget option for GPS, GPS-2 and GPM installations, but no longer for their successors) gave their identity away. The ground-floor landings even featured a variant of Mitsubishi's dot-matrix indicator sometimes found in 1990s installations with finer pixels and thicker typefaces. Their cabs were finished with laminated mahogany wood on the walls, and cream and yellow-colored marble on the floors, which seemed to be a recurring design motif found in nearby upscale hotels built in the similar era as this one. Among the four cars in the group, only the two on the left provided access to the basement bar. Except for some lateral vibrations the ride quality was on the smooth side, although they seemed too slow for the number of floors served.
Manufacturer: ETA-MELCO Elevator Co. L.L.C.
Model name: GPM-M
Year of commission: 1999
Loading: 900kg (1,980lbs)
Capacity: 13 persons
Full speed: 2.5m/s (500FPM)
Serviced floors: B, *G, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 (cars No. 1 and 2); *G, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 (cars No. 3 and 4)