Big news, Downtown Denver fans–a W Hotel is coming to LoDo!
You may remember that a W Hotel was planned (although never officially announced) for a site behind Union Station. That deal fell through in 2006, but Starwood Hotels, parent company of the urban-hip W Hotel brand, kept Downtown Denver at the top of its expansion city list. Today, Sage Hospitality announced its plans to build a W Hotel and Residences at the underutilized Office Depot site at 16th and Market. Here’s the official press release from Sage and the story, W Stamps Brand Downtown, from John Rebchook at the Rocky Mountain News.
Sage Hospitality, the Denver-based hotel developer led by CEO Walter Isenberg that recently developed the Residence Inn project at 18th and Curtis, just completed the acquisition of the Office Depot property from the Cook family. The acquisition included not only the Office Depot building on Block 046, which sits on a 31,250 SF lot, but also the surface parking lot across the 16th Street Mall next to Sonada’s on Block 047, a 15,655 SF site.
The W Hotel and Residences project will be located on the site of the existing Office Depot building. Construction is planned to begin Fall 2008 and to be completed approximately two years later in 2010. The parking lot parcel will be used for construction staging for the W project and then, after the W’s completion, provide Sage with yet another exceptional development site–although specific plans for that parcel have not been announced. Renderings of the proposed W are not yet available.
The project is envisioned as a 12-story building, containing 180 hotel rooms and 56 residential units. The project site is located just inside the B-7 LoDo zoning (the alley between the Office Depot and the Larmier Place condo tower is the dividing line between the LoDo B-7 zone and the Central Business District B-5 zone). The site is also covered by a LoDo Special Review District, which allows for an increased building height to 130 feet. Consequently, the building will most likely take a form somewhat similar to the 16 Market Square and Sugar-3 projects nearby; I’m guessing a seven-story base, built to the property line, containing ground-floor retail/restaurant/lobby uses and the hotel rooms, and a stepped-back residential portion of an additional five stories on top.
I was very excited when the W was rumored to come to the Central Platte Valley, but this proposal is even better in many ways. The CPV already has tremendous momentum, given the success of the Riverfront Park project and the whole Union Station redevelopment due to come online in the next four years. While the W would have been great at that location, the 16th Street Mall needs all the help it can get and would receive much more of a boost from the presence of a W than the CPV would. The five-block line-up of the W Hotel, 16 Market Square, the Sugar buildings, Mercantile Square, and EPA HQ will make the west side of the LoDo stretch of the 16th Street Mall a remarkably dynamic and architecturally worthy urban place and one of the best parts of Downtown Denver. I’m also pleased to know that Sage will be helping Office Depot find a suitable place to relocate to somewhere in the core Downtown area. We need to keep Office Depot in a location where it’s accessible by walking/mall shuttle to the Downtown residential and workforce populations.
The future for Downtown Denver just keeps getting brighter and brighter!
