Fully-furnished hotel rooms shipped to Brae

Specially-built modules containing fully-furnished rooms for the Moorfield Hotel in Brae have been shipped to the isles.

The rooms – complete with beds, bathrooms and mini-bars – have been transported onboard the huge cargo vessel Arklow Moor from Warrenpoint Harbour in County Down in Northern Ireland.

They arrived in the early hours of Sunday and have subsequently been transported by a fleet of Streamline lorries to their final destination.

Before being shipped the modules were built in factory conditions by construction company McAleer and Rushe.

Building them there left the company free to operate in a controlled atmosphere, with no delays brought on by poor weather conditions.

Project manager Paul Marlow said the new new hotel should be finished by the end of the summer, with the planned opening in August.

“Obviously we’ve had a presence there [in Brae] for the last few months doing the groundworks in preparation. We’ve actually formed the hotel bedrooms here in Northern Ireland, and they were shippped across there at the weekend. They are now being transported to Brae for on-site assembly. So we have a construction phase now of a few months to actually construct the hotel.

“It’s put together in a modular construction. It’s put together on site. They are fixed next to each other. And then all the externals are finished and any other building, so once it is actually finished you wouldn’t know it has been formed in a modular way.

“They arrived in Lerwick at the port at 2am on Sunday morning. They have been offloading them today and transporting commenced today.”

The arrival of the modules follows a similar project which was adopted for the construction of the Mid Yell Junior High School.

Units for that project were shipped from Denmark three years ago, but the building technique may still be regarded as something of a novelty.

The 100-bedroom hotel is being developed by Glasgow-based BDL Management Ltd, which has a portfolio of 50 hotels across the UK.

The Moorfield will be built, initially, for Total employees working on the new gas plant.