Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1266179
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 5 JULY 2020 NEWS 8 JAMES DEBONO THE addition of a second, 19-storey tow- er over the former telephone exchange in Paceville is set to increase Mercury House's total apartments from 275 to 435. The already-approved 31-storey tower designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, will also increase by 8.4m to accommodate an additional residential floor, a servic- es floor and a roof bar. The whole project will now include 131 hotel rooms, 683 parking spac- es and over 6,400sq.m of commercial space. The second tower was reduced slight- ly from the 23 floors foreseen in initial plans to 19, to mitigate its visual impact. When it comes into operation, the Mercury House development will only employ approximately 80 full-time em- ployees. The original development brief ap- proved in 2005 had originally limited the height to 15 storeys, limiting its use to offices and shops, and top-floor apartments and penthouses. It was on the basis of this brief that Pender Ville Ltd originally won the 2005 concession for both the Pender Place and Mercu- ry House sites for Lm10.6 million (€24 million), seeing off the owners of St George's Park as their main rivals for the concession. But in 2012, the Planning Authority allowed its extension to two adjacent office towers of 19 and 18 floors. When Pender Ville sold Mercury House to Gozitan developer Joseph Portelli, the latter applied for a permit to build a 31-storey high-rise. The second phase of the project will now add retail outlets to the lower floors of the Go telephone exchange building, and residential units for the upper floors. Visuals from the yet-to-be-ap- proved hotel and high-rise project at St George's Bay by the DB group have been inserted in studies assessing cu- mulative visual impact of Mercury's second tower. The Environment Impact Assessment concludes that Mercury House's visual impact will be lower due to the "pres- ence of other high-rise buildings per- mitted in the area". The splitting of the planning applica- tion in two ensured that studies under- Mercury high-rise have 435 apartments