New Irish owners hatch radical plan to redevelop the Savoy

The new Irish owners of the Savoy hotel group are planning a huge redevelopment of the iconic flagship hotel on London's Strand.

The new Irish owners of the Savoy hotel group are planning a huge redevelopment of the iconic flagship hotel on London's Strand.

Quinlan Group, a Dublin investment company founded by a former tax inspector, Derek Quinlan, bought the famous chain from US investors Blackstone Group and Colony Capital for £750m last week.

The deal gives them four of London's most famous hotels - the Savoy, the Connaught, Claridge's and the Berkeley - as well as the Simpson's on the Strand restaurant.

Peter Donnelly, a partner of Quinlan, who negotiated the deal, said the new owners have ambitious plans for the chain. The most radical is a wholesale redevelopment of the Savoy to expand the art deco hotel.

Quinlan wants to reconfigure the hotel to add 150 extra rooms to the existing 236, as well as adding 36 rooms to Claridge's over the next couple of years.

However, Mr Donnelly revealed that more controversial proposals are in the offing.

The most dramatic is to expand the Savoy by filling in the centre of the horseshoe-shaped site where the hotel stands. This area is currently used as a taxi rank and car pulling-up zone.

"We want to see if we can reclaim some of the wasted space," Mr Donnelly said.

"It will be an engineering and disruption challenge. Also highly important are the heritage considerations and the impact on our neighbours."

Quinlan is expected to open discussions in the next few months with English Heritage and Westminster Council about the viability of the scheme.

The other plans are to expand the group internationally.

Blackstone, which spent over £100m refurbishing the hotels and bringing in celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing, considered this but shelved the proposal because of the number of other "Savoy" hotels around the world.

Mr Donnelly said that Quinlan would look to buy upmarket hotels in places such as New York and Paris and integrate them into the Savoy Group under their own names.

"We have four distinctive brands and we can have twinned properties in other cities that are sister hotels, but probably under different names," he said. "We are not looking to create a chain, just to expand the brand."

He also said he hoped to revamp Simpson's on the Strand, which is famous for its roast beef lunches.

"It should be funkier," he said. "We have a potential to reposition it. If it stays as it is, it is in danger of becoming a bit of a dying dinosaur."

Mr Donnelly said all the plans would be discussed with the Savoy's management, which is led by its chief executive, Geraldine McKenna, who is being left in charge of the hotels on a day-to-day basis.

Quinlan already owns four hotels in Europe, all of which are managed by Four Seasons, a Canadian group.

It also has more than £1bn- worth of other property investments, including a massive portfolio that it bought from Deutsche Bank earlier this year.

The company originally started as an accountancy and tax advice business, set up when Mr Quinlan left the Irish Revenue Commissioners in the 1980s.

It now arranges investment deals for a group of wealthy private clients. Famously secretive, it refuses to disclose how much it has invested or the number of its clients.