High end in Five Pts.
Hotel Highland to target upscale market
Birmingham Business Journal - March 9, 2007 by Lauren B. Cooper Staff
Renovations continue on the old Pickwick Hotel in Five Points South. Its new name will be the Highland Hotel and will feature a martini bar, developers say.
View Larger Developers of the renovated Pickwick Hotel in Birmingham's Southside will call their new boutique offering The Hotel Highland @ Five Points South.
Currently undergoing a $7 million renovation, the historic property is being transformed into a high-end boutique hotel by Atlanta-based Long and Cox Properties Inc., Denver-based Richfield Hospitality Inc. and Birmingham's Peggy Dye & Associates.
Long and Cox announced in November the hotel had been purchased and was to be renovated, but at the time its name and many of the details were not disclosed.
Slated to open early May, the 63-room property is being transformed into a high-end destination hotel, with modern guestrooms, a martini bar and a state-of-the-art fitness room.
"The new ownership of the hotel is making a significant capital commitment to the property," said Tom Conran, Richfield's vice president of development, in a prepared statement. "We are very excited to be a part of such an ambitious project and our team is confident that the emergence of The Hotel Highland @ Five Points South will quickly become a destination of choice as the only upscale boutique hotel in the Five Points South area of downtown Birmingham."
Mark Hucek, corporate director of sales and marketing for Richfield, said although the hotel will be geared towards an upper-middle-class traveler, prices for rooms will be competitive for the area, ranging from $159 for a regular room to $179 for a suite.
This is the third life for the building, which was originally built as a medical office building in 1919 and later renovated into a hotel in 1984. When the building became a hotel, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Touting a chic and luxurious atmosphere, all 63 guestrooms will be renovated to include marble and granite bathrooms, new modern furniture and LCD TVs. Twenty-eight rooms are suites, which additionally will receive small appliances.
The hotel's martini bar will front 20th Street with a street entrance and will be located where the Pickwick had its breakfast room. The breakfast room will move to the hotel's courtyard area, company officials said.
Garnering recent culinary attention from national newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Five Points South area is home to numerous white-tablecloth restaurants, those known for attracting both local and national upscale clientele.
All of renowned chef Frank Stitt's restaurants - Highland's Bar and Grill, Chez Fonfon and Bottega Restaurant and Café - are located in Southside. Other celebrated eateries include Hot and Hot Fish Club, Ocean and its sister restaurant 26.
"If you look at the Five Points area, individuals drive in from Atlanta to have dinner and then they go home," Hucek said. "We believe this area is having a second resurgence with these restaurants. Hopefully, (the hotel) will help that area rebound even further."
David Parker, general manager of Highland's Bar and Grill, said he is excited about having a boutique hotel nearby that he can recommend to out-of-town customers, not to mention the possibilities it will bring for the area.
"Anytime you have existing restaurants and businesses renovating, it encourages everyone else," he said. "It's one of those things, if you clean one window you want to clean another. We're all in historic buildings down here and they need a lot of love and tenderness."
Interior designer for the new hotel, Peggy Dye & Associates, has been based in Birmingham since its founding in 1981. Since then, Dye has designed for numerous hotel brands, including Holiday Inn, Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, Embassy Suites and Marriott Renaissance, and currently is working on 20 different hotel projects across the country, she said.
Richfield Development said Dye, as an equity partner in the hotel, will consider The Hotel Highland her "showplace."
Developer Long and Cox specializes in development of properties in the hotel and lodging industry.
According to Richfield Hospitality's Web site, the Hotel Highland's management company oversees more than 5,000 rooms across the country for brands such as Hilton, Starwood, Intercontinental and Choice, in addition to several boutique and independent hotels.
lbcooper@bizjournals.com (205) 443-5635