New look planned for proposed hotel on Tacoma’s old brewery site
February 6th, 2008 - Category: Hotel, Real EstateThe developers of a proposed 160-room hotel on the site of Tacoma’s old Columbia-Heidelberg Brewery say they’re redesigning the hotel after its preliminary design failed to impress historic preservationists on a city board.
Han Kim, principal at Seattle’s Hotel Concepts, said Monday that he’s hired Albany, Ore., architect Don Johnson to modify the initial design to make it more compatible with the nearby Union Station Historic District.
Johnson designed a Hilton Garden Inn in Corvallis, Ore., with brick to blend in with Oregon State University buildings nearby.
Members of Tacoma’s Landmarks Preservation Commission were critical of initial drawings that Hotel Concepts presented at a December meeting. Kim said then that those drawings were meant to give a rough idea of how the eight-story building might appear.
Commission members told Kim those drawings looked too much like a suburban freeway hotel.
Kim said the new design, which he hopes to submit to the commission by the end of February, will likely incorporate a brick facade like the one on the Silver Cloud Hotel near Safeco Field in Seattle. But incorporating the old brewery’s water tower into the design, as some preservationists had suggested, has proved to be too expensive, he said.
Kim’s group owns the northern two-thirds of the brewery block at 2120 S. C St. He would demolish a hodgepodge of old brewery buildings to create the hotel.
The hotel developers say they want to build a modestly priced Holiday Inn Express with rates of about $120 a night.
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