Sustainability with style
With all the comforts of home, travelling sustainably has never been so simple
We understand the importance of being able to travel sustainably without limitations. As proud holders of a gold award from Green Tourism, we pay attention to details that matter and make sure that the most stylish serviced apartments in Birmingham are also environmentally friendly.
Here’s how we took our green credentials to new heights:
FURNITURE
1 — Our sofas are built using wood from a sustainable source by Naughtone. Naughtone is an environmentally-friendly company based in Harrogate. We style the sofas with cushions made by the brilliant Heather Linnitt at Eclectic Chair. Heather is a demon upholsterer turned furniture designer based in Manchester.
2 — We mix mid-century furniture from the fifties, sixties and seventies with specially commissioned pieces. We salvage items and restore them to their former glory. For instance, many of our dining chairs are upcycled sixties originals.
FOOD AND DRINK
3— We provide locally-sourced organic (or
4 — Each serviced apartment gets its own freshly roasted pack of locally roasted coffee beans from Quarter Horse. This keeps it fresh and waste is kept to a minimum. If you need more, just ask at reception. Quarter Horse deliver our coffee using an electric vehicle to help reduce emissions. The coffee is supplied in refillable metal tins, which each hold up to 10kg. The QH team simply pick up the empties each delivery!
5 — We pop half or one pint of fresh milk into our guest’s fridges before they arrive. We used to provide this exclusively in one pint bottles but we found we were wasting so much milk that we now offer a mix of one quarter print plastic and a full pint depending on the number of people staying/length of stay. We t return all the milk bottles via our milk supplier to the dairy for recycling. That’s at least 100 milk bottles being re-cycled every week!
KEEPING IT CLEAN
6 — We want to provide sparkling clean apartments for our guests, but avoid the use of harmful chemicals. So we use eco friendly cleaning products by Delphis Eco.
7 — Guests enjoy hand-blended aromatherapy toiletries products, which are free of SLS’s and parabens. The large bottles are biodegradable and recyclable. We don’t provide products in tiny plastic tubes and bottles favoured by most hotels as they cause massive amounts of waste. The products are vegetarian-friendly too.
8 — Guests find environmentally-friendly cleaning products in the apartments such as Ecover washing up liquid (in the new even more recyclable bottle). We also provide eco washing machine tablets, dishwasher tablets plus toilet rolls from a sustainable source.
9 — We ask guests to place unused pillows and towels in the wardrobes. Our housekeepers know that they are fresh and don’t need to be laundered.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE (CARDBOARD) BOX
10 — We upgraded our curtains and – as it takes a lot of material to cover our floor-to-ceiling windows – we were left with a tonne of old sets. We really didn’t want all that old material to go landfill. The solution we came up with was having it reworked into handmade ‘bags for life’ by Morsbags.org.
11 — We aim to be a paper-free office. Asana, our handy communications tool, saves the need to keep paper files on site as everything is uploaded and stored. We’ve added a guest guides section to our website for our guests in order to reduce the need for printouts. Where we do have to use paper we always buy recycled stock and then we recycle it again after use.
Learn more about our eco friendly approach to business with our sustainability matters directory.