Sustainable wellness at Beyond Apartments
An interview with James Fry, Founder & CEO
Welcome to episode 077 of the Green Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today.
I’m your host Matt Morley and in this episode I’m in London talking to James Fry, Founder of Beyond Apartments & Aparthotels.
Having launched in 2021, Beyond are the UK's leading sustainable serviced apartment, aparthotel, and BTR operator. The brand now has a pipeline of aparthotel projects across the UK, partnering with future-focused owners, developers, and investors. Current sites are located in London’s Fitzrovia, Waterloo and the West End.
Carbon neutral, low waste and low toxicity, these are billed as healthier spaces in which to stay, live and work. They also have a concept of ‘sustainable wellness’ that we explore in more detail during our conversation.
James has over 12 years of experience in the hospitality industry, and was previously Managing Director of Base Aparthotels in Switzerland, he has plenty of pedigree in other words. Here is James Fry of Beyond Apartments & Aparthotels.
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Green Healthy Places episode 077 BEYOND APARTHOTELS
Talking aparthotel wellness sustainability
mattmorley
James I'd love to define if we could some terminology to start with - these terms have been floating around in the world of real estate and hospitality for a while now but an apart-hotel and a 'serviced apartment'. How do you pick them apart?
00:27.55
JAMES
I think the idea behind serviced apartments or 'extended stay' as they're called in America has been around for a while, they're much bigger in the US and Asia.
I like to define serviced departments as residential stock. It may have limited facilities and be a mix of 1-, 2- and 3-bedroom apartments where people come for long-term stays in general.
An aparthotel is very much the terminology in Europe, those tend to be hotels in every way you think of them, so including a restaurant, a bar, maybe a roof terrace, gym and so forth.
The big difference compared to a hotel being that we have slightly larger rooms with kitchens in them, and that changes a lot as it means guests have more convenience, more flexibility about how they live when on site and they have the choice about eating out or cooking in the room.
A Beyond Apartment interior
mattmorley
Does that then relate to any specific market dynamics working in favor of this type of concept?
02:16.21
JAMES
It's always been a slightly overlooked part of the market. Everyone's concentrated very much on hotels I Think there's been a race to the bottom of how small can we make a hotel room and get away with it.
There's hotel chains that have got 14m2 rooms that do very well, they serve a strong need. During Covid the sector of the market that performed least badly was the aparthotel market.
I think also as travel habits have slightly changed after that, certainly corporates are looking for their employees to travel slightly less but when they do travel stay slightly longer.
There's also been an emergence partly because of Airbnb of people saying actually, 'I like the ability to to be able to to stay in to cook, to put some food in the fridge'.
Often we get asked do people really use the kitchens in the rooms, it's not relevant to how often they cook, it's that they have that convenience, they can use a coffee machine, put some beers in the fridge and so forth.
So we tend to find that once people have used the concept they won't go to anything else. This is now the fastest growing part of the hospitality market.
Green hotel guests
04:15.32
mattmorley
You've then set out your stall very clearly around sustainability and health and wellbeing as part of that guest experience. So if you map those together what have you learnt around the type of guest that you're attracting, you mentioned corporate bookings for example?
04:47.00
JAMES
I think first and foremost we wanted to create a company that aligned with our values and beliefs and we say:
"we're a sustainable company first that happens to provide accommodation solutions"
So that means from the ground up part of our DNA, every decision we make is based around finding a low impact and healthy solution to then create the product that we offer and the services that we give our guests.
What we have found over the last few years and and previously I did another aparthotel concept along similar lines in Switzerland (Base) was what we call 'a growing minority of individuals' feel very strongly about sustainability because it aligns with their values and beliefs so they will search out products and services that reflect that.
We've also seen the corporate market changing quite dramatically even in the last 12 months as they are being pushed by legislation to find suppliers that offer low impact solutions, partly because of the scope 3 emissions which they declare in their annual reports.
Healthy indoor environments and fresh air
Also sort of new age companies, tech companies understand where the world is going in the future, they are aligned with us in many of their values already.
Google and Apple for example have identified that if they provide low toxicity, healthier spaces for their staff they see productivity increase and that's what we're looking to do in our buildings.
Guests and corporates alike are drawn to the low carbon emissions story, our low waste policy and low water usage.
A Beyond aparthotel interior render
Hotel carbon emissions
07:23.23
mattmorley
Should we just double click on the term that you use there scope 3 carbon emissions for anyone who's who's not familiar and how that ties into the bigger picture but clearly that is kind of the gold standard in terms of declaring your carbon emissions right? I think most companies are still focused on scope 2.
For anyone who's curious to understand what that equates to perhaps you could just summarize how a company would go about considering their scope 3 emissions indirectly down the value chain?
07:56.39
JAMES
Well that's all about who you buy from, so who you support further down in the supply chain. It's the decisions you make every day about where you spend your money.
Healthy non toxic paints
Look at a brand like COAT paints who we use, they make everything in the UK and you send back your pots to them for recycling. The product has practically no VOCs the harmful toxic off-gases which a lot of paints have in them. COAT send you colour swatches rather than little pots of paint that often get wasted. Everything they do is about lowering their environmental impact.
mattmorley
You have several townhouse sites in London either signed, opened or in the pipeline. What are the key characteristics in terms of a given location for your sustainable welllness aparthotel concept to work?Does the focus on sustainability limit your site selection opportunities?
09:58.13
JAMES
It does it limit our opportunities because we won't compromise on our values and we have a lot of people come to us and say that we've got a hotel, can you quickly do some of your green stuff and we we can tick the box? Unfortunately, not.
Ideally we concentrate on how a site is built, in particular insulation, the window fittings, the fit-out materials such as paints, floorboards, furniture, adhesives, and so on.
So there are some limitations if we're working with developers. We have our brand standards that they need to fit those sites out for and going forward we'll be developing our own sites which will mean building and fitting out those rooms to have minimal environmental impact.
Green energy from the grid for a sustainable aparthotel concept
11:25.53
mattmorley
So you mentioned insulation, for anyone wondering - that would be about heat loss, therefore energy efficiency which leads us to the question around energy. The UK is in a fairly good place with green energy available on the grid.
How do you how much of a factor is that in the decision-making process? Can you can take on a site and switch to green energy from the grid, or would you perhaps look at adding solar panels on the roof? How do you think about the energy piece in general at Beyond?
11:57.18
JAMES
Well we are looking and measuring how much energy is used onsite and then where possible generating our own energy on site. Of coure being 100% electrical is very important.
Buying from what we consider the greenest energy provider in the uk - green energy uk only sell what they generate, they don't buy off-set credits and so forth.
We have been audited twice in terms of our energy use, waste generation, water usage, and so forth. We score particularly well for the carbon output on our energy usage. But the first thing is really to look at ways to reduce the amount of energy we use in a building and then look to where you get that energy from.
Indoor Air Quality in Beyond aparthotels
13:02.62
mattmorley
You mentioned the term Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in relation to the wall paints used in your apartments, the intent being to minimize the VOCs, which is all about enhanced Indoor Air Quality.
So if brands like Google and Apple consider the wellness credentials of their workspaces, what else have you done thus far to deliver a clean indoor experience in the apartment rooms?
13:54.28
JAMES
We use zero chemicals in our cleaning processes. We use a water and salt-based solution that passes through an electric current. That changes the water and salt solution to make it an anti-bacterial solution which kills 99.9 percent of bacteria.
It's good for floors, kitchen surfaces, bathrooms, commercial kitchens... I used it for five years in the hotel in Switzerland previously. Then we also use ozone to clean our linen sheets and towels and that is chemical-free.
Oxwash commercial laundry is another fantastic company to provide solutions like this and they deliver it all back to us on cargo bikes or an electric vehicle. So again, it's the whole thing. It's not just the front product and what they do.
You know there's very few places as toxic as a clean hotel room if you clean every single day with a heavily toxic cleaning liquid. A lot of people travel and then wake up with a bit of a sniffle in the morning, what they don't realize is the hotel room itself could be part of the problem.
We care for our guests obviously but also for the health of our maids - a forgotten piece of the hospitality equation as they suffer from 40% more respiratory diseases than the general population, as well as skin issues on their hands very often from exposure to non-natural cleaning liquids.
We once had a family stay with us at my previous hotel chain and the mother came down to tell me that her my son had a number of medical issues meaning his skin always comes out in a rash when staying at a hotel. He'd been physically sick in some hotels apparently. Anyway, this powerful American lady demanded to know what we were doing differently as he hadn't suffered any of the usual ailments while staying with us.
That was a very powerful moment where I realized the kind of effect you can have on people with such sustainable operations policies and non-toxic indoor spaces.
17:35.95
mattmorley
Any hotel in London is obviously dealing with very low quality outdoor air rightso how do you tackle the intake of polluted outdoor air?
18:19.45
JAMES
We've got an air filter in one of our sites now and it's something we have spoken to a number of companies in order to implement a solution across the board in our apart hotels. It turns out such things are easier to fit at the earlier stages of a development rather than a retrofit, that's the take-away for us.
But you're exactly right, it is vitally important that you're not pumping street air into the room.
Waste and recycling in a green aparthotel
19:00.48
mattmorley
What about waste and recycling - how as a hospitality operation as with a service department angle do you tackle that? There's clearly a huge amount of waste produced by a typical hotel so how have you managed to reduce that or find efficiencies in your operational waste?
19:52.23
JAMES
Waste is the sort of forgotten piece of the equation in a way because a huge amount of energy, water and transport is normally involved in making something and getting it into somewhere often for it just to be left or unused or.
We have a concept called FCM - Functional, Comfortable, Modern, meaning if something doesn't serve a function that adds to the comfort of the guest in the modern way, it doesn't make it into our rooms. So less magazines, leaflets, brochures, throws, vases, cushions and so forth. All of that would have to maintained, cleaned or replaced regularly.
We also removed any single use plastics from the in-room experience. Recycling really isn't the way to go, it has to be about reuse instead, that's just about changing your supply chain. It means refilling rather than throwing away. I'm still amazed by how many hotels I go to and find the small shower gel bottles in their rooms.
We will be doing two things going forwards, we would look to have a Zero Waste shop concept on the site where people can order on an app and items can be deliverer to their rooms. We want to create a 'Beyond box' so that if people rebook with us they can put their partially used ingredients from the kitchen (olive oil, salt, spices, toiletries, even clothes) into that box.
We store it safely and when they come back to a new room they find their things waiting for them neatly. It's about providing more convenient, better solutions to guests as well as reducing waste.
23:19.86
mattmorley
Obviously what you're not doing is providing the quintessential show off moment for many hotels of the breakfast buffet right?
Ah, you've taken that away completely and and clearly that doesn't necessarily require a different understanding of the luxury experience but it is a very different way of of thinking about what a serviced guest experience means right? You're removing that but on the basis of your guest being people who have some existing consciousness of what possible waste that might represent. Instead you say, 'we're just going to provide you with exactly what you need', nothing more.
24:24.10
JAMES
Yes so we have the 'Beyond breakfast bag' concept where people can order exactly what they want on a daily basis and it will turn up outside their door. It only works because we are an aparthotel so they hav eaccess to their own kitchen, plates, glasses, coffee machine and so on.
We've all seen that lavish buffet and at the end of the breakfast service half of that has to be thrown away.
26:05.30
mattmorley
Besides an arrival experience and the guest room or guest micro apartment itself, what are the facilities you anticipate being part of that guest experience that you would integrate into the building when available versus things that you might want to provide access to nearby?
For example, a hotel gym or wellness studio, is that something you anticipate doing or do you think that's something you'd rather outsource to a local expert if the location provides an opportunity?
Hotel gyms and wellness facilities
26:43.63
JAMES
Where possible we would always try to fit in a wellness space, a gym space within the environment of the aparthotel is very important to give people that option onsite.
We ideally would have also a co-working space where people can work or meet over a cup of coffee, as well as a restaurant and bar facilities.
We won't be going down the vegan route or anything like that just looking at local and seasonal produce and again how to dramatically reduce the amount of waste generated from that environment, both in terms of food but also packaging.
The future of Beyond Apartments & Aparthotels
28:43.95
mattmorley
And so looking ahead for the next say 24 months or so what have you got in the pipeline? What are you able to talk about that might be around the corner for the brand?
28:55.90
JAMES
There is exciting times for sure! We're a fairly young company but as you mentioned earlier, we have a couple of sites open in central london which are trading very well. The market has been strong over the last eighteen months or so.
We have secured two other projects in London for aparthotels as well as a site in Harrogate which is a lovely part of of Yorkshire, then we're working on a number of other opportunities both in London and in places like Edinburgh and Birmingham.
So we are keen to expand our portfolio in the right way and and we're having a number of discussions.. Basically capital has realized the value in being aligned with a ESG business like ours. So I think it's interesting times in the finance community for what we're doing. We're also seeing a growing number of corporate clients looking for this type of service.