Sustainability with style at Staying Cool

We are proud holders of a gold award from Green Tourism. We pay attention to detail and make sure that the most stylish serviced apartments in Birmingham are also environmentally friendly:

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 free range) store cupboard ingredients that are also Fairtrade, such as hot chocolate and sugar.

Enjoy complimentary tea and coffee throughout your meeting in your self serve kitchen at Rotunda Birmingham

4 — Each serviced apartment gets its own freshly roasted pack of locally roasted coffee beans from Quarterhorse. 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 a 100% 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 a pint of fresh milk in glass bottles into our guest’s fridges before they arrive. This is because we hate the waste involved with the tiny plastic UHT milk pots most hotels rely on. We then return the milk bottles via our milk supplier to the dairy for recycling. That’s around 100 milk bottles being re-used 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.

Staying Cool body wash, shampoo and conditioner

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.