In London, Edinburgh-based Apex Hotels will open its third London property on April 1 (no joke) on famous Fleet Street. The 184-room Apex Temple Court will be located in a 12th century building which Apex acquired from professional law association Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.

It is rumoured that Dubai-based Jumeirah Group is close to signing a management agreement with Turkish business woman and entrepreneur Demet Sabanci Centindogan for its first hotel in Turkey: the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, which was acquired by Ms Çetindogan at the end of last year. The 115-room property is Turkey’s oldest hotel; it opened in 1895 to provide luxury accommodation to travellers after the city became the last stop on the legendary Orient Express. In April 2008, the hotel closed for a US$30 million restoration project and reopened in September 2010.

In Miami Beach Kimpton Hotels has (re)opened the Surfcomber Hotel. Kimpton brands itself as a boutique operator. With 186 rooms we think the Surfcomber is a bit to big to be boutique, but goodlooking it certainly is. With size comes a range of five-star facilities and a location right on the beach on South Beach’s Collins Avenue.

DLF to HNA. Indian real estate giant DLF is finalizing its sale of the Amanresorts group to China-based HNA Group. HNA is reported to be one of the five bidders for the 25-unit ultra-luxury group and is expected to pay $449 million for it. Aman is a household name in the boutique hotel operators market and considered a real trophy assett.

Scandic, the Nordic countries biggest hotel operator has been opening some very interesting hotels lately in Stockholm and Oslo. Maybe Stavanger, Norway, will be on the list to in 2013 when a second Scandic is open, a 210-room “architectural unique” property near the city centre.

For the W Jakarta we will have to wait untill 2015. Located in the Ciputra World Jakarta 2 mixed-use complex, the W Jakarta will feature the well-known W Hotels amenities. It will have 300 rooms and will be Starwood’s 12th W hotel in the Asia-Pacific region and 60th worldwide.

The hotel’s renowned Harry Denton’s Starlight Room nightclub and lounge located on the 21st floor has reopened its doors paying homage to the nightclub’s storied past, while celebrating with a present-day décor. Decadent classical lines of Venetian architecture combined with a vibrant contemporary energy.

The space manages to combine both an intimate lounge atmosphere, with cozy Prohibition-style booths hidden behind beaded curtains and a high-energy setting, with a black terrazzo dance floor with a white starburst pattern and tiny lights illuminating the space.

An innovative new cocktail program has also been introduced by newly appointed Bar Manager Joel Teitelbaum, which he describes as an “ambitious journey of the cocktail through time.”

Sitting along 200 feet of prime Atlantic Oceanfront with direct beach access and a beachfront pool, the Surfcomber has 186 rooms, along with event and meeting space. Under Kimpton’s management, the 1948 Art Deco-themed hotel is slated to receive an extensive makeover to enhance the event space and guestrooms, and to create a chef-driven culinary concept unique to the location. Refurbishments are expected to be completed by late 2011 in time for the area’s popular Art Basel event. At that time, Kimpton also will officially roll out all the iconic programs and services for which the company is known.

“Florida is an exciting place to be right now and we’re excited to expand our footprint in the Sunshine State with an anchor in such an amazing Miami Beach location,” said Kimpton CEO Michael Depatie. “The combination of an historic Art Deco hotel, fantastic ocean-front location, our signature Kimpton design and our unique guest programs, is a recipe for success among the competitive set in the area. We are honored that The Surfcomber owners, CPSB, Inc., have given us the opportunity to guide this property back to its rightful place as a South Beach jewel.”

“I have followed the growth of Kimpton over the past decade and I have always wanted to bring their expertise to South Beach. Our property is at the crossroads of all the best that South Beach has to offer – Lincoln Road, the Convention Center and the New World Symphony. The stars have aligned for us to work together and with Kimpton we now have the opportunity to unlock the full potential that our property can bring to our community,” said Robert Balzebre for CPSB, Inc.

San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, a collection of boutique hotels and chef-driven restaurants in the US, is an acknowledged industry pioneer and was the first to bring the boutique hotel concept to America. Founded in 1981 by Bill Kimpton, the company is well-known for making travelers feel welcomed and comfortable while away from home through intuitive and unscripted customer care, stylish ambience and having a certain playfulness in its approach to programs and amenities.

Kimpton closed on the purchase of the 195,000-sq.-ft. building—located across the street from the landmark Independence Hall—last week for US$11.5 million. The planned Monaco is tentatively slated to debut in mid-2012, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Kimpton opened its first hotel in Philadelphia a year ago. The 230-key Hotel Palomar Philadelphia has recently been awarded LEED Gold certification. “Certainly, the performance of the Palomar helped us with the decision” to build a second hotel here, Kimpton CEO Niki Leondakis tells the Inquirer. “But we’ve been looking in this market for several years.”

The Monaco project also reflects Philadelphia’s emergence as a meetings and conventions hub. The city is opening an expanded convention center in March, and tourism officials are concerned that Philadelphia’s existing hotel inventory is insufficient to handle the expected demand.

Like the Loews PSFS before them, both hotels are fine examples of adaptive reuse — they’ve brought new vitality to what were previously run-down, half-filled office buildings.

The ways in which each has achieved that are quite different, and they provide eye-opening lessons about the points where contemporary design and architectural preservation intersect.

Located in the old Architect’s Building at 17th and Sansom, built in 1929, the Palomar was particularly challenged by the mixture since it faced one more mandate: to hone to strict sustainability constraints as the chain sought to obtain its first LEED gold certification.

For L.A.-based interior designer Dayna Lee, that meant finding ways to make the limited patterns and colors currently offered by green fabric makers more visually interesting. Lee says that using an artistic grab bag of seamstress tricks like “decorative stitching, rusching, ruffling, and piercing” helped her enliven the hotel’s window treatments, dress pillows, and rugs.

A few blocks away at 15th and Arch, Le Meridien faced its own obstacles: a 1911 building designed by Horace Trumbauer (he of the Union League, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other Philly institutions) with a meandering layout — the result of several expansions — and a patchwork assemblage of hanging-in-there tenants.

“It was a very complicated renovation,” says John Hayes, Jr., a principal at local historic restoration specialist Blackney Hayes. “We joked that there were 202 rooms — and 202 room types. Many of the existing conditions were not observable until after the demolition, so getting all of these disparate elements to form one cohesive project was quite challenging.”

Chief among the problems: an interior lightwell that in the 1970s was turned into a skylit atrium, featuring steel balconies that delighted the renovation architects with their retro hipness. Now, elevators let out onto the balconies, which overhang the atrium. An oblong hole in the middle of each floor remains, surrounded by exterior brickwork. A problematic design feature, yes, but one that offers drama and surprise to visitors.

Erected as a showcase intellectual center for the YMCA — the upper floors of the 8-story building once contained dormitories — the building eventually served as headquarters for the District Attorney’s office. Indeed, one of the hotel’s showstoppers is the Y’s old study hall, which later served as the personal office of the D.A.

It’s easy to imagine the rank and file ADAs slaving over their computers and legal pads, while folks like Ed Rendell, Ron Castille, and Lynne Abraham lorded it up in this richly-panelled room. Watched over by the great names of Homer and Goethe inscribed near the ceiling, they could easily cast longing glances at the tower of City Hall looming just outside the windows.

The Palomar, though pretty much gutted, also has enough of the good stuff left to intrigue architecture aficionados. It too offers a (much smaller) library — a refined, sunlit room that features a black marble fireplace, crown molding, coffered ceilings, and pocket doors. Its simplicity and symmetry say Philadelphia Federal not Art Deco, the period in which the building was erected.

Architects also preserved the building’s ornate second-floor elevator lobby, which isn’t Deco, Federal or any other one thing. Instead, Lee speculates, this mashup of Moorish and Mediterranean tilework may have been used as a way for resident architects to showcase their diverse talents and styles.

In her own nod to the building’s roots as the place where architects came to roost, Lee has added artwork that’s about, she says, “study and process.” Several complex paper constructions incorporate art history textbooks and even the Palomar’s blueprints. At the entry to the hotel, Lee’s placed her own work, a sort of pop-up book that references architectural tomes.

Le Meridien, too, looks to original art to add pizazz to its already jazzy red, black and white interiors. In the dining room, for example, a mirrored work pays homage to Philly’s “LOVE” sculpture by repeating the word over and over in smudgy, lipstick-red paint.

In both hotels, the lobbies are the stars. The Palomar opts for cozy yet whimsical modernity, with neon-hued busts of Ben Franklin, curving sofas, and a great fireplace of sculpted white lacquer that’s as slinkily Art Deco as a Jean Harlow bias gown.

Le Meridien takes its amazing dark panelling  — much of it original, and some of it cleverly reconstructed — as a jumping off point, peppering the spaces with clean, linear white furniture that contrasts dramatically with, while never stealing any thunder from, the building’s bones.

Each property clearly understands the role of its contemporary interventions. “The criteria of the historical consultants was that any surface material we applied should contrast with the existing ones,” Lee says, “so the two are never confused.”

Hayes echoes that sentiment. “The design concept was to respect the historic character with new elements touching the building in the lightest, most graceful way,” he says. “None of the old stuff is actually engaged by any of the new — the bar backs and communal tables, the dropped ceilings, the lighting, even the exterior glass canopy — all appear to float away from the original marble, wood, and plaster surfaces.”

Squeaking in under the wire before the recession put other projects on hold, these two hotels complement each other and enhance the Philadelphia design scene. At last, we’ve been gifted with the “hip” hotel factor that much smaller cities have already embraced for a decade. And, we can all enjoy the fruits of complex renovations that have returned the luster to two long-neglected, much-beloved structures.