A new hotel is planned for Downtown Denver: Aloft Denver City Center at 800 15th Street.

Aloft is a Starwood Hotel brand featuring a modern, sleek aesthetic that’s targeted to a younger, urban-oriented customer. The proposed Aloft Denver City Center project is being developed by Denver-based JBK Hotels LLC. In December 2012, JBK Hotels filed a development application with the city and the project is currently going through the city’s review process. Here’s a Google Earth aerial where I’ve outlined the project site (click to embiggen):

The project site is located at the corner of 15th and Stout, currently occupied by a former Burger King restaurant building that’s straight out of 1970s suburbia. Since Burger King vacated the property in the 1990s or early 2000s (not exactly sure when), the building has been a revolving door of cheap restaurants. Here’s a very recent photo of the property (surrounded by a chain-link fence—always a hopeful sign!) by our very own Ryan Dravitz:

What a forlorn site. I think it’s safe to say that all DenverInfill readers and urbanists everywhere will cheer the redevelopment of this property.

The parcel is small, only 12,500 square feet, so the new Aloft hotel is not going to be a large building, but it certainly will have a huge positive impact on this corner. The project will be six-stories high and about 70,000 square feet in size. A below-grade level will include hotel functions and a swimming pool/fitness area. The ground floor will include about 2,000 SF of retail and lobby uses and a porte-cochère with vehicle ingress off Stout Street and vehicle egress via the alley between Stout and Champa. The upper five floors will contain approximately 140 hotel rooms.

The following image was taken from the project’s development application to the city (architect is Olive Architecture of Raleigh, NC). Here’s a perspective of the 15th & Stout corner:

On the left is Stout Street (southeast) facade, where the porte-cochère entry is visible to the left of the lobby. On the right is the 15th Street (northeast) facade. For the first three floors on the southwestern side, the project shares a common wall with the La Boheme building.

A relatively smaller-scale project like this is a perfect complement to the many large newer towers nearby like Spire and the Hyatt Colorado Convention Center, resulting in a greatly improved pedestrian environment and further restoration of the urban fabric in this part of Downtown. Hopefully, the chain-link fence around the site means that construction will begin later this year.