It used to be one of Georgetown’s most popular hotels and “hang out joints” during the ’60s and ’70s and come March 15 the Penthouse Hotel will be making a “comeback.” – with all the suavity and sophistication of a modern hotel.
Its location, at the corners of Hincks and Commerce streets, seems an unlikely place for an “up market” hotel. The area is a perpetual sea of humanity – vendors of all sorts, money-changers, throngs of shoppers and the permanent din of half a dozen minibus parks.
Pamella Monasseh, the hotel’s manager believes that the environment can work to the new hotel’s advantage. “Hotels in busy commercial areas are not untypical of the Caribbean,” she says. She believes that the hustle and bustle of “the very heart of the city” will provide the hotel’s guests with an opportunity to experience “the very essence” of downtown Georgetown. That, she says, is part of what the tourist experience is all about.
Randolph Baichandeen has backed his personal confidence that the Penthouse can return to its “glory” days with a multi million dollar investment in the total transformation of the facility. He has rechristened the 30-room hotel Le Grande Penthouse, a title which his son Kavim says adds a touch of “French sophistication” to the facility. The old Penthouse, he says, has been replaced with “a modern facility, the kind that suits the contemporary traveller.”
For the Baichandeens Le Grande Penthouse is about keeping a family legacy alive. The remodelling of the hotel is a shared project conceived by Randolph and executed in collaboration with Kavim and the elder Baichandeen’s wife, Chaterani, an engaging woman with a self-confessed enthusiasm for the reincarnation of the new look hotel.
Randolph Baichandeen rates the Le Grande Penthouse “at least a four star hotel. To make his point he took Stabroek Business on a guided tour of the hotel. The investment shows. Inside, the ambience and d
