from yesterday's Times-Picayune
Condo hotel and tower on Royal to take shape
$50 million job to start in 2008
Thursday, November 08, 2007
By Jaquetta White
"Construction on a $50 million project to renovate a long-vacant Royal Street hotel into a luxury condo hotel is set to begin early next year, the developers said.
Developers Angelo Farrell and Lee Laporte, doing business as Royal Cosmopolitan LLC, also announced this week that they have hired Salamander Hospitality LLC of Virginia to operate and manage the site.
The Royal Cosmopolitan will be the state's first condo hotel and, when construction begins, the first new hotel project to break ground in the city post-Katrina" ....
"Farrell and Laporte bought the more than 100-year-old Astor Hotel building at 121-25 Royal St. in 2005 for $3.2 million. They are spending $50 million to renovate the site, which has been closed for decades except for a few retail operations on the bottom floor. The plan also calls for building a new 26-story, 259-foot tower behind it, in the middle of the block bounded by Royal, Canal, Bourbon and Iberville streets.
The 131-room Royal Cosmopolitan will be a condominium hotel, or "condotel," which means its rooms are available for sale as condominiums but the buyers can share in the revenue from guests who stay there when they don't.
The project first became public in 2005, when a version of it won approval from the City Planning Commission, the Central Business District panel of the Historic District Landmarks Commission, and the City Council with no opposition from French Quarter residential and preservation groups. That proposal was for a 17-story, 178-foot tower, a building only slightly taller than the Astor Crown Plaza in the same block.
But after Katrina, the developers went back to those groups asking to increase the height of the unbuilt tower by nine floors, to 26, because they needed to increase the number of rooms and suites from 80 to 152 to cover construction costs that had risen by 35 percent to 40 percent since Katrina. The new 268-foot proposed tower would be significantly taller than the Astor Crown Plaza.
That proposal drew objections from French Quarter preservation leaders and two City Planning Commission members, but it eventually was approved in a 6-2 vote by the planning panel and unanimously by the landmarks commission in December 2006. The project also won unanimous support from the City Council in February after the developers made a last-minute decision to reduce the structure's height from 268 feet to 259 feet.
Previous attempts to rehabilitate the hotel failed to gain either financing or city approval.
The condotel is scheduled to open in early 2009. It will feature 107 condominium suites and 24 guest rooms in the original building. The units range in price from $349,000 for the smallest one-bedroom unit to $879,000 for a penthouse suite.
The property also will feature valet parking, a skytop bar and lounge, and an infinity pool.
The hotel will employ about 600 people during the construction phase and 250 when it opens." ...
for the complete story see:
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/mone
y-1/1194502939317450.xml&coll=1
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