Less than a month after announcing the imminent closure of its cafés on Grafton Street and Westmoreland Street, Bewleys Oriental Cafés Ltd is looking for planning permission from Dublin City Council to extend and refurbish its hotel at 10-12 Westmoreland Street, Dublin 2.
The hotel group is looking to relocate the hotel reception area and restaurant and new cocktail bar to the ground floor café rooms. It is proposing turning reception rooms on the first floor to bedrooms and create additional infill bedrooms on the third and fourth floor roof areas at the rear of Princes Lane. Bewleys also want to remove a modern mezzanine and change the use of the ground floor front servery area to Westmoreland Street from café to a retail unit. It is looking to refurbish and extend the existing link at the rear and build a glazed access atrium on the rear façade.
In a separate application to Dublin City Council, Bewleys is looking to expand the hotel on Fleet Street/Westmoreland Street into the foreign language school on the upper floors of the café on Westmoreland Street. This will include amendments to the internal layout and front façade windows.
Bewleys announced the closure of its Grafton Street and Westmoreland Street cafés in October which were €4 million in debt. The cafés were sold and leased back from Treasury Holdings to finance refurbishment work needed to keep the businesses afloat. Treasury is understood to have paid €10m for the buildings in 1999; they are now estimated to be worth at least three times that figure.
Bewleys has an option to buy the Westmoreland Street premises next year and it is believed it intends to exercise this. Campbell Catering, the parent company, is reported to have said it would prefer to operate a public destination space rather than sell the building for offices.
The first Bewleys was set up by Joshua Bewley in Sycamore Alley off Dame Street in 1840 as a shop selling coffee. Its first café opened on George's Street in 1894. In 1996 €12 million was invested in modernising facilities and giving the cafés a general face-lift.
