With a new downtown Columbus hotel scheduled to open before the end of the year, the W.C. Bradley Company announced this morning what flag the property would be flying.
The hotel under construction along the Chattahoochee River at the 14th Street bridge will be branded a Hotel Indigo, Bradley Company Real Estate Division President Pace Halter said at a morning news conference.
Hotel Indigo is a chain of boutique hotels owned by InterContinental Hotels Group. As of last fall, there were 112 Hotel Indigo hotels worldwide.
“We made a conscious decision to select a brand that was not in Columbus, really not anywhere in the geographic area surrounding Columbus,” Halter said. “And there are aspects of that particular brand and brand standards that were very appealing to us. It was a fairly easy decision and one we had been working on for well over a year.”
The hotel will have full-service dining overlooking the river, There will also be a rooftop bar that will also offer dining options, Halter said. The hotel is situated near the final rapids on the 2.5-mile Chattahoochee River whitewater course.
The restaurant for the boutique hotel will be a farm-to-table model with much of the produce and meat coming off the Bradley Company farm in Stewart County, Halter said.
The 107-room, nearly $30 million Indigo went under construction last year, but Bradley Company officials would not confirm the branding until today. It is the third new hotel under construction in a two-block area of downtown.
A 125-room AC Hotel is being built in the mid-1200 block of Broadway. Construction started last summer with the official groundbreaking in November. That hotel is owned by RAM Hotels, a Columbus company that owns and manages almost two dozen hotels in Georgia and Alabama, including the Courtyard by Marriott in Phenix City, just across the Chattahoochee from the new Indigo.
An 88-room Hampton Inn is being built at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street, a few doors down from the AC Hotel location. That is owned by the Columbus-based Pezold companies, which also owns the downtown Marriott in the Historic District. That Marriott is across Front Avenue from the Columbus Convention & Trade Center and is scheduled to begin a major expansion later this year.
The new seven-story Indigo will likely be the first of the three new hotels to open. The other two are scheduled to open early next year.
“I think we will absolutely beat the other two hotels up, based on the schedules I have heard from them,” Halter said. “For us, the decision was fairly easy. We studied the market, obviously, very closely and talked to all of the significant hotel room users in the market, from the Trade Center to the major corporations. Obviously, we have had for a very long time a significant shortage of hotel rooms in the downtown area, in particular.”
The Indigo will be owned by the Bradley Company and managed by Maximum Hospitality, a hotel management company based in Memphis, Tenn. The rooms will rent for about $165 a night, Halter said.
The Indigo is the second phase of the redevelopment of the Bradley Company owned riverfront property between the 13th and 14th Street bridges and Broadway and the river. The Rapids, a 226-unit apartment complex opened last year in the area the company is calling Riverfront Place. There is also the Mathews Swift park between The Rapids and the new hotel.
When the hotel is complete, the Bradley Company will be about $90 into the four-phase project. An office building, a large parking deck, and another apartment building and retail space are planned for the site. The only slice of the property where the new development is under construction is the Country’s on Broad barbecue restaurant.
There is no timeline for that additional construction, Halter said.
“We have just engaged our architecture firm for phases three and four,” Halter said. “So, they are working on plans.”