A new hotel is coming to Downtown Denver’s booming Union Station district.

Denver-based Focus Property Group is planning to build a 12-story Hilton Garden Inn on their property at 20th Street and Chestnut Place. The new hotel will have an L-shaped footprint that wraps around the historic Denver Hose Company No. 1 building that will be fully restored and incorporated as part of the project. Here’s a Google Earth aerial on which I’ve outlined the approximate location of the new hotel development:

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The floors in the tower’s base will contain the lobby and registration areas, banquet and meeting rooms, a fitness center, and other hotel amenities. The tower’s upper floors will contain approximately 200 hotel rooms. Parking will be accommodated on two underground levels, and the hotel will also include a swimming pool and a rooftop lounge. Here is a rendering of the preliminary design, courtesy of JG Johnson Architects:

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A really exciting component of this development is the restoration of the historic Denver Hose Company No. 1 building, which sits right at the corner of 20th and Chestnut. Built in 1883, the small 3,224 square foot structure served the Denver Fire Department until the early 1920s, after which it became a print shop and later on a welding shop. The building has been vacant and deteriorating for years, but in order for a full restoration and reuse to be economically viable, it had to be included as part of a larger project. Fortunately, that time has finally arrived. The Hilton Garden Inn’s restaurant will make its home in the historic building.

Here are a few photos from my recent tour of the site, thanks to Josh from Focus Properties. First, the outside of the Hose Company No. 1 building:

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The Denver Hose Company No. 1 building is a designated Denver Historic Landmark, so the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission must give its approval to the project. So far, the LPC has approved the mass and scale of the new tower, with additional approvals for both the new construction and the restoration of the historic building still to come. The inside of the old building is currently kind of dark and scary, but one day in the near future it will be a beautiful, light-filled restaurant space.

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A non-historic building, currently occupied by Home Run Self Storage, is also present on the site. The part of this non-historic building next to the historic Hose Company building will be demolished to make way for the new Hilton Garden Inn and its porte-cochere, while the part closer the middle of the block will remain on an interim basis and be leased as office space. Focus Property Group, which owns the entire block except for the Xcel Energy electric substation and a few slivers of right-of-way owned by the city near the railroad tracks, will ultimately build three projects on the block, all facing Chestnut Place. After the Hilton Garden Inn, the second project would occupy roughly the middle third of the block and would replace the remaining part of the non-historic building. One concept for the second project that Focus is considering is to build another hotel that could share the porte-cochere with the Hilton Garden Inn. The third project, perhaps an office building, would occupy the larger rectangular site at the 19th Street corner.

The proposed Hilton Garden Inn project schedule calls for the (partial) demolition of the Home Run Self Storage building this coming spring 2015, with construction on the hotel and restoration of the historic building getting underway by summer 2015. Completion of the project is targeted for late 2016.

We’ll keep you updated on this exciting project as the hotel design is refined and we get closer to construction!