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Condo tower in resort city offers
amenities and urban setting
by Otesa
Middleton Miles
for Virginia Business
October 2006
Virginia Beach’s
landscape is getting taller. At 38-stories and about
500 feet, the Westin Virginia Beach
Town Center Hotel and Residences is expected to be
the tallest building in the state. That’s nine
floors higher than the current tallest building, the
29-story
James Monroe state educational building in Richmond.
With more than 20 floors already up, the project
is easy to spot when flying into the Norfolk
airport,
says Lou
Haddad, president and chief executive of Armada
Hoffler, the project’s owner and general contractor.
Yet, size is only one of the building’s prominent features. The $186.3
million project will combine retail and residential space with a conference center,
hotel and parking garage, making it a new focal point for the Town Center of
Virginia Beach. An all glass staircase and chandelier made of Fresno lens, used
in lighthouses, will give the hotel lobby “a lot of wow factor,” says
Haddad.
The building sits on 2.7 acres. On the ground floor
is 41,500 square feet of retail space. A 25,500-square-foot
conference center occupies the second
floor,
and there’s adjacent parking up to floor five. Then the 236-room hotel
occupies the sixth through 15th floors. The 119 condos will be on floors 15
through 37.
The bulk of financing, $157 million, came from private investment. Virginia
Beach kicked in about $26 million to help pay for the parking garage,
conference center,
a pedestrian bridge and landscaping.
Serving divergent interests was a challenge from
the start. “Doing a project
of this magnitude offers a barrage of challenges in a public, private partnership,” says
Haddad, whose company worked with the city, development authorities,
the hotel operator, and retail and residential brokers.
Security and
access presented another challenge because of the building’s
various uses. Retail outlets needed back doors for deliveries and access to back-of-corridor
spaces, says Bernard Shumate, the project executive for Armada Hoffler. Yet those
features had to be separate and inaccessible from the back entrance of the hotel
or the condo lobby. Condo owners in high-rise buildings want security, notes
Shumate. “We’ve gone through the thought process
to make that work.”
The four-star hotel will open next year. Condo owners
are expected to move in that winter. As of mid-summer,
63 percent of the condos,
priced
from
$400,000 to $4 million, had been spoken for. One advantage of
living above a hotel:
amenities
will include room and maid services.
The 903,113-square-foot tower topped with a spire
will add to the Town Center’s
bustling urban image, says Angie Lynd, vice president of the Virginia chapter
of the Associated Builders and Contractors. “The town center concept took
off,” says Lynd. One advantage: residents won’t have to
go far for food or entertainment. The Westin project sits across the
street from a
performing
arts center that will open next year, a comedy club, an apartment complex
and restaurants.
Project: Westin Virginia Beach Town Center Hotel
and Residences
Owner/Developer: Armada Hoffler
Cost: $183.6 million
Architect: BBG-BBGM
General contractor: Armada Hoffler
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