AC Hotels by Marriott, a European-style boutique hotel brand, will include Irvine in the first wave of a development push in the U.S.
Woodbine Development Corp., a Dallas-based developer that specializes in hospitality properties and destination resorts, bought land late last month for a seven-story, 180-room hotel at the Park Place mixed-use campus at Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive (see related story, page 3).
Construction is expected to begin in earnest by next summer, according to Dupree Scovell, managing director for Woodbine’s Los Angeles office.
The project should take about 14 months to build, Scovell said.
First, Looking for More
It’s the first hotel project in California for Woodbine.
The privately held company, which is backed by institutional investors, is on the lookout for other sites in Southern California, particularly Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, Scovell said.
Plans filed with the city call for the hotel to go on a site where a one-story building that previously housed a restaurant was recently demolished. It’s next to a flagship LA Fitness gym, which opened at Park Place last year.
Irvine-based LA Fitness, which operates under the Fitness International LLC name, has offices at one of the buildings at the campus, which also is home to Western Digital Corp. and numerous other businesses.
It’ll be the first hotel built at Park Place, the 105-acre office and retail campus next to the San Diego (405) Freeway and Jamboree Road.
The campus, which is largely owned by Irvine-based LBA Realty, has seen a surge of development of late, in particular apartment construction.
Park Place Apartments, a 980-unit complex still under construction by Newport Beach-based Irvine Company, has begun leasing. Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group has plans for its own 520-unit apartment complex, called Vireo, to be built next to the hotel site.
A Ritz-Carlton hotel was once proposed for Park Place, but that development—first considered in the late 1990s—never moved ahead.
AC Hotels—which has been described as “an upper moderate tier lifestyle brand” within the Marriott International Inc. collection that’s “inspired by the runways and fashion houses of Milan”—makes more sense for the site, Scovell said.
“We’re a big believer of the product; it’s a niche that hasn’t been filled here,” Scovell said.
Joint Venture
AC Hotels was founded in 1998 by Antonio Catalán, a Spanish hotelier. It has nearly 80 properties in Spain, Italy, France and Portugal.
AC Hotels and Marriott formed a joint venture in 2011 with a goal of building several dozen hotels in the U.S. over the next few years.
The first AC Hotel by Marriott opened in the French Quarter of New Orleans this year. Other initial locations confirmed by the company are in Miami Beach and Kansas City, Mo.
Local reports also list Palm Springs; the Buckhead district of Atlanta; Chapel Hill in North Carolina; and Des Moines, Iowa, as other potential locations. Development costs in the $20 million-to-$25 million range have been cited for some of those proposed projects.
The cost of the Irvine hotel’s development has not been disclosed. Terms of Woodbine’s land purchase, made with LBA Realty, also were not disclosed. A deal with Woodbine for the land had been rumored to be in the works since the start of the year.
The design-driven project should appeal to business travelers during the week, as well as leisure travelers on the weekend, Scovell said.
Millennial generation travelers and European tourists have been cited as core audiences for other AC Hotel projects in the U.S.
“It’s the right setting for a project like this,” Scovell said. “It’s really cool, and contemporary.”
