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W Hotel -- what's the story?


sande07

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28 stories and 328 feet. "W" normally builds trendy hotels with small floorplates. They are a boutique hotel and the property won't have more than 200+ rooms. Basically from the side view, it will look as wide and thin as Adelicia and not be much taller.

Earl Swenson is the architect of record, I do not know who the secondary architect is.

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Earl Swenson and Associates have had offices in the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel tower since the 1980's and they designed the Bellsouth Tower, however an architect friend of mine says most of their stuf is a copy of something else. There is a building in Australia that was built BEFORE the Bellsouth and they are almost identical.

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I cannot think of anything that Swensson has designed that I'd look at a second time. I think the Vandy Plaza is a$$ ugly. Likewise, I think Batman is uninspiring. I think they've done a lot of hospitals and medical offices in the midtown area too. They're usually pre-stressed concrete crap.

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I cannot think of anything that Swensson has designed that I'd look at a second time. I think the Vandy Plaza is a$$ ugly. Likewise, I think Batman is uninspiring. I think they've done a lot of hospitals and medical offices in the midtown area too. They're usually pre-stressed concrete crap.
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I have heard a different architect has been working on those plans. Interestingly, when I ran into the developer a few weeks ago he sounded much more confident in the office deal than the hotel project. He said something on the order of "we're definitiely moving ahead with the office deal...we'll see about the hotel project". I didn't press him for details but you can read into that what you want to.
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I had heard that too but I didn't want to post it until I heard it confirmed by someone else. The Dallas group was Gatehouse Capital. They did the Victory W with Perot Jr's company, Hillwood. If, indeed, they are out then I'm even more skeptical of a start of this office deal without more pre-leasing. This could also cloud the start of the Rythm project. They've announced and reannounced start dates many times now but just a month ago a sales agent in their office told me it would break ground on 6/1. Since then I've heard "June 15th" and "sometime in June". We'll just have to wait and see but I find it odd they haven't gone ahead and demolished the old empty house Lifestyles used to rent. That seems like a no-brainer if you're weeks away from a ground breaking. Then again, no sense in knocking down a perfectly rentable building if you're going to shelve things for a while or go back to the drawing board all together.
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You weren't the only one that thought that to be the case. We've had discussions about project probability a lot on this board and I get a fair rash of grief for seeming so cynical but these big projects are very difficult to pull off. I expect there will be a few more disapointing announcements made in the next couple of months.
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You weren't the only one that thought that to be the case. We've had discussions about project probability a lot on this board and I get a fair rash of grief for seeming so cynical but these big projects are very difficult to pull off. I expect there will be a few more disapointing announcements made in the next couple of months.
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And you agreed. "Being bookended between Comfort Inn and the "not quite" the Best Western doesn't quite have the cache of the American Airlines Arena. That said, I hope this new group will get a high quality project figured out because the lipstick and makeup hastily applied to the ramshackle buildings across the street is beginnning to wear thin."
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These (above) are the same reasons I'm skeptical that this is a good class A office site. I think it probably ranks 3rd or 4th on the list of the 4 or so that are currently trying to break ground. If too much time passes with only Swenson in the bag the boys from Texas might start sharing my view.
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The Demonbreun strip where the W would go could swing in any direction, but I guarantee you that if the W goes there, most of the cheap stuff will diappear in time because the land will become too valuable for a Comfort Inn, BW and fake stucco'd restaurant to stay.
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