Buildings that people spend their free time in.
Arima Leisure Limited is a London development company. We work on leisure and hospitality buildings — the hotels, gyms, restaurants and clubhouses that a place is judged by, and that are considerably harder to get right than they look.
A development company with one sector on its mind
- Registered name
- Arima Leisure Limited
- Company number
- 03094386
- Incorporated
- 23 August 1995
- Principal activity
- Development of building projects (SIC 41100)
Most development companies will take on whatever the market puts in front of them. We have taken the narrower route, and stayed with leisure and hospitality since the company was formed in 1995.
The reasoning is straightforward. A leisure building is not a shell with a use written on the drawings. A swimming pool is a structural and mechanical problem before it is an amenity. A commercial kitchen dictates extract routes that a residential scheme never has to think about. A hotel's servicing strategy, its acoustics between rooms, and the hour at which deliveries can legally arrive are all decided long before anyone chooses a finish — and getting them wrong is expensive in a way that cannot be designed out later.
That knowledge is the reason to appoint a specialist. It is accumulated slowly, by watching what a building does once it is occupied, and it does not transfer from a warehouse or a housing scheme.
We work with landowners, operators and investors who are bringing forward a leisure or hospitality asset and want the development side handled by people who have thought about this building type before.
What we do
Development is mostly the unglamorous part — the appraisal, the planning strategy, the procurement route, the programme. We take responsibility for that.
Sectors we work in
Related building types, with the same underlying disciplines — heavy servicing, public occupancy, and an operator whose revenue depends on the detail.
Hotels & accommodation
New-build and conversion hotel schemes, aparthotels and serviced accommodation, including the acoustic and servicing strategy that decides whether a guest returns.
Health & fitness
Gyms, studios and leisure centres. Structural loading, ventilation and impact acoustics govern these buildings far more than the fit-out does.
Food & beverage
Restaurants, bars and food halls, where the extract route, the grease strategy and the licensing position have to be resolved at the earliest possible stage.
Mixed-use leisure
Schemes where a leisure or hospitality floor sits under residential or commercial storeys, and the interfaces between the two do most of the damage if left late.
Sports & community
Clubhouses, pavilions and community sports facilities, usually delivered to a fixed budget with a committee to carry and a season to hit.
Refurbishment
Repositioning existing leisure buildings — extending life, improving efficiency, and bringing a dated asset back to a standard an operator will sign a lease on.
How we work
Four stages, in order. Most of the value is created in the first one, and most of the cost is created by skipping it.
Feasibility
Can this site take this use, and does the arithmetic survive contact with the operator's real requirements? An honest answer here is worth more than an optimistic one anywhere later.
Consent
Planning, licensing and the statutory approvals, run as one strategy rather than a sequence of separate applications that each discover the last one's assumptions.
Delivery
Procurement, contract and construction. The development manager stays the same person throughout, because handovers between stages are where intent gets lost.
Handover
Completion, commissioning witnessed properly, operator familiarisation, and the defects period actually managed rather than left to expire.
Talk to us about a site
If you have a site, a building or a brief and want a straight view on whether it works, that first conversation costs nothing.
Monday to Friday, 9am–5.30pm
Barnet
EN4 0QS
Barnet EN4 0QS