Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 18
One Forty West is a hotel and residential tower that was completed (more or less) in August 2020. The first twenty-three floors are (or are going to be) a Four-Star M‑‑‑á (or M‑‑‑ã) Hotel, whose opening has been postponed until March 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
(Update: When I first posted this text, I included the name of the hotel chain that is going to run the new hotel on the first twenty-three floors of One Forty West. As a result, my screen was and still is flooded with advertisements from this hotel chain, offering rooms at extremely low prices, considering that these are supposed to be four-star hotels. The reason for the low prices, presumably, is that we are still in the middle of a pandemic, and hardly anybody is travelling or staying at hotels. I can easily imagine their prices doubling or tripling once the pandemic is under control.)
Balconies on the upper floors of One Forty West
The upper floors will consist of 193 apartments, 99 for sale and 94 for rent. Prices for the condominiums start at 13,000 Euros per square meter, and go up from there. (For comparison: the average price for a condominium in Frankfurt is 4,947 € per square meter, according to mcmakler.de. The average price in Paris is 10,586 € per square meter, according to MeilleursAgents.)
Each apartment in One Forty West has a large balcony; in fact, the façades for floors 24 to 41 seem to consist entirely of balconies. But the hotel rooms on the first 23 floors just have normal windows, making the building look somewhat top-heavy in my opinion.
One Forty West with Messeturm, Observatory and Senckenberg
The name One Forty West comes from the building’s authorized height of 140 meters, as listed in its building permit. As in several other Frankfurt skyscrapers, the builders got somewhat carried away and forgot to stop building when they reached 140, so its actual height is 145 meters, making it the 18th tallest building in Frankfurt as of February 2021.
One Forty West replaces a former university skyscraper, the AfE-Tower, which was demolished in a matter of seconds on a Sunday morning in 2014.
My photos in this post are from 2020. I wrote the text in 2021.
What can you see from those balconies? And how good are the elevators. (That would be my main question) My husband hates to live close to other people so we’ve had an apartment only once. I didn’t mind it so much – he hated it.
I grew up in a house, but have lived in apartments for most of my adult life. Now we live in a ground floor apartment in a small building with only one apartment on each floor. And we own the building, so we can decide who gets to live on the two upper floors.
I’m sure the balconies will all have good views, but the problem will be that about 1/4 of them face north and will thus not get much direct sunlight. Another new Frankfurt building, the “Grand Tower”, avoids this problem by putting the elevators, staircases and technical stuff on the north side, so nobody’s balcony has to be there.