Annebrook planning 50-room extension on supermarket site
A major boost is coming the way of Pearse Street: hotelier Berty Dunne has bought the empty Dunnes Stores/Eason shop, and intends extending his Annebrook House Hotel to the site.
If granted planning permission, Mr Dunne intends that the extension, which will be physically connected to the existing hotel, will contain an extra 50 bedrooms and new leisure and spa facilities.
“We bought that premises from Dunnes Stores just probably 12 months before the pandemic started and we went for a pre-planning meeting with the council on the strength of what we were hoping to develop,” says Berty.
“The big issue we have at the moment is a shortage of accommodation in Mullingar: every weekend, we are inundated with people looking for rooms, especially on the Friday or Saturday nights.”
He believes the extension will benefit his business and the town generally: “It should be a huge add-on to the hotel and a huge add-on to the facilities in the centre of town: it’s a great thing to have hotels in the centre of a town; it’s great for footfall locally.”
At present, the building is a one-storey, but the architectural team led by Ronan O’Halloran of O’Halloran Rooney Architects are proposing to transform in to a three-storey, and to provide a façade in keeping with the rest of the street and in line with the existing hotel.
“Ronan and engineer Martin McCormack of Martin McCormack and Company are working on it and putting the things together now, and I would hope to have a planning application gone in inside the two months or so,” says Berty.
At present there is a staff of 110 in the hotel, which has just passed its 15th anniversary, and Berty anticipates that to cater for the additional business, staff numbers will rise to around 150.
Even before the pandemic, it was clear there was a need for more rooms, and Berty’s experience is that the weekend demand for bedrooms is coming largely from the home market, and much of the weekday trade tends to come from people in town for work reasons.
“We have a lot of trade coming from Dublin. That’s been established over the years of us trading and now it’s ongoing, and people keep coming back from Dublin. It’s a very handy train, bus or car journey for them.”
Why they keep coming back is that they like what they find: “With the enhancement of the streets, the result is we have a very pretty town: when we’re living in it, sometimes we don’t see how good it is, but the feedback we get from people visiting the town is that with the shops and boutiques, coffee shops, it’s a lovely place to visit and they can go out to Belvedere for a day and it’s absolutely fabulous – there’s not too many towns have a facility like that on their doorstep.
“Also we’re very safe and the Chamber of Commerce have done Trojan work with the purple flag and all that makes our town very nice – and that’s what people see when they come down here and that is why they keep returning.
“We also have an awful lot going on with regards to all the different factories that are in town now and you have service engineers and different tradesmen and salesmen coming to these factories and staying with us so the commercial end of the business during the week, it’s very busy also.
“The other thing we have is the weddings. The old Annebrook House is a huge attraction, and being able to offer the old and the new to young couples who are looking for something different has turned out to be quite popular - but for us to put up the wedding guests, we would absolutely need the extra rooms.”
Berty is excited about the direction Mullingar is going, and as a member of the executive of the Chamber of Commerce, he is happy to see so many businesses coming back on board as members,
“It’s pushing very hard for the town and the town is coming along in leaps and bounds,” he says, adding that the enhancement has made a marked difference.