Posted Aug 11, 2012, 1:40 PM
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Halifax Promoter!
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Halifax
Posts: 1,080
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From the CH today
Higher hotel design for Citadel site inches closer to approval
16 hours ago
By REMO ZACCAGNA Business Reporter
Work continues on the former Citadel Hotel site in Halifax on Friday. The city is considering a proposal to add to the planned replacement, two hotels of 15 storeys each. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)
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A PROPOSAL to add two floors to each of the two hotels planned for the former Citadel Hotel site is one step closer to receiving municipal approval.
The city’s design review committee signed off Thursday night on a request made by SilverBirch Hotels and Resorts of Vancouver, which is building a Homewood Suites and Hampton Inn at 1960 Brunswick St., to add two storeys to the hotels, making each building 15 storeys high.
City staff had endorsed the revised site plan, which now goes to regional council for final approval.
Trevor Morgan, regional vice-president for SilverBirch, said Friday that adding two more storeys made sense from a market perspective, particularly in the wake of the $25-billion shipbuilding contract awarded to Irving Shipbuilding Inc. and the planned $500-million Nova Centre on Argyle Street.
“Both of those things, along with the already healthy market in Halifax, we feel warranted us adding to our total inventory of hotel rooms that we’re planning for that site,” Morgan said in a telephone interview.
Halifax Regional Municipality approved a site plan in March for two 13-storey hotels containing 159 and 119 rooms, respectively, and a 17-storey rental apartment building with about 153 units, which will be owned by GWL Realty Advisors Inc. of Toronto.
However, in May, a revised plan was submitted to the city that requested an additional two storeys be added to each hotel for a total of 316 units.
The two additional floors will be added above where the original 10th floor was planned and “provide the two hotel towers and podium with a better defined base, middle and top,” states a SilverBirch report provided to the city.
“The masonry on both towers has been brought up two floors higher to better accentuate the middle portion of the design,” according to the report.
Morgan said everything else about the original proposal will remain untouched.
“To somebody who would have seen the original design and if they see the design after the addition of the two floors, there really is not any change of the overall look. It’s just simply the addition of two floors.”
The project, which was designed by Chamberlain Architect Services Ltd. of Burlington, Ont., will also feature a 7,000-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment building. The two hotels will have a retail and commercial ground floor and a 9,000-square-foot conference centre.
The hotels, one of which will cater to business travellers and the other to extended-stay visitors, will share amenities but will have a separate lobby, entrance and identity.
Adding two storeys will not alter the planned timeline of an April 2014 opening day, nor will it have a “significant” impact on the original price tag for the project.
“Obviously, until we get complete construction costs nailed down, we’re not anticipating a significant increase in costs,” Morgan said. “There will be a small increase in cost, but we still anticipate the total cost to be somewhere between $60 million and $65 million.”
Demolition of the old structure, which opened in 1963 as the Citadel Inn, has finished and a crane was recently added to the site.
“We’ve just begun creating the foundations for the buildings and, really, it’s in the initial stages of preparing the site to start building upon it,” Morgan said.
(rzaccagna@herald.ca)
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