From bank to five-star hotel
The Merchant Hotel began life as the headquarters of the Ulster Bank, built in the mid-nineteenth century. The bank's directors reportedly travelled to Glasgow and Edinburgh for ideas, wanting a building that looked elegant, substantial and prosperous — and they ran a competition, with the design of a Glaswegian architect, James Hamilton, chosen from over sixty proposals. What went up was an Italianate sandstone palace: a Doric ground floor, Corinthian above, a three-bay pediment topped by the figure of Britannia attended by Justice and Commerce.
Inside, the great banking hall sits beneath a domed ceiling — the same soaring room that is now the hotel's Great Room restaurant, said to hold the largest chandelier in Ireland, a 400kg piece made by Tyrone Crystal with thousands of blown-crystal pieces. The building is Grade A listed, and when the Beannchor Group transformed it into the five-star Merchant Hotel in 2006, that hall became the heart of it.
The spa came later. A £16.5 million extension in 2010 added new guest facilities, and it's up there — on the roof of a former Victorian bank — that you'll find the hot tub and rock sauna looking out over the Cathedral Quarter, with the thermal suite, hydro-pool and treatment rooms below. It's a rare thing: a modern spa wrapped inside a piece of Belfast's grandest architecture.