Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Hotel construction delayed by a change of architect
The contractor building the Cambria Suites in Roanoke said the delay should be short.
The latest from The Ticker blog
Progress on a planned Cambria Suites hotel at the Riverside Center in Roanoke is stalled because the owner and developer of the site hired a new architect.
Wisconsin-based Telemark Hotel Group LLC has proposed building a 127-room hotel at the future biomedical park on Reserve Avenue. Roanoke authorities spent about $3.2 million to ready the site for development.
Some work there already has begun, but in May, Telemark decided to change architects for the project, said John Gardner, vice president of business development at J.M. Turner & Co., which is the general contractor for the hotel.
Initially, Telemark had hired Roanoke firm Katz, McConnel and Associates as the architect. Now, the company has switched to Bob Williams, an out-of-town architect, according to city permit records.
Williams has designed other hotels for Telemark, Gardner said.
Gardner said he did not know why Telemark hired a new architect. And Glenn Solheim, a partner with Telemark, did not return a phone call for further details about the hotel's progress.
This architect change has delayed construction of Cambria Suites for at least a month so far.
"We all felt as a team, the prudent thing to do was to wait for him [the new architect] to get up to speed" on the project, Gardner said.
He said he expects construction to start back up shortly, but he was hesitant to state an exact date.
"We're ready to move forward," Gardner said. "There's really no story here, other than the fact that there's a delay."
Telemark applied for a building permit for the hotel in November.
Heather Soule, a spokeswoman for Choice Hotels International in Maryland, said the Roanoke Cambria Suites should open in mid-2008 if construction resumes soon.
Choice Hotels owns several hotel brands. The Roanoke location would be its 49th Cambria Suites franchise nationwide, Soule said.
