Want Live in a Hotel? San Jose Approves Combined Condo, Hotel Building Near Diridon Station 28 Feb 2020, 12:06 am

Mercury News | Mercurynews.com article here

By Maggie Angst | Bay Area News Group

A new building combining hotel rooms with residential condominiums in one of San Jose’s most sought after neighborhoods will be the first-of-its-kind in the city and in step with the vision considered for the area around Diridon Station.

The San Jose City Council has unanimously approved plans submitted by Dallas based Kade Development to build a nine-story building — featuring a 303-room hotel and 19 condominium units on the top floors — on the corner of Stockton Avenue and Julian Street.

Architectural Dimensions has submitted plans to build a mixed-use development consisting of a 303-room hotel and 19 attached residential units at 292 Stockton Ave. in San Jose.

The development will be in one of the city’s most rapidly transforming areas —  just blocks from the SAP Center, Diridon train station, bus rapid transit on the Alameda and Google’s proposed transit village.

Kade Development bought the vacant 0.86-acre site from the San Jose Redevelopment Agency for $4 million in 2018, according to Santa Clara County property records.

“This is very exciting,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said during the council meeting. “I look forward to seeing the shovel hit the ground.”

Condominium residents and hotel guests will enter the building through separate lobbies but share amenities such as an indoor pool and fitness center. A rooftop deck and common area on the building’s top floor will be reserved for condo residents.

The 19 condominiums will be one- and two-bedroom units ranging from 806 to 2,229 square feet. The building will also include a three-story underground parking garage with 129 spaces for residents and guests.

Erik Schoennauer, a land-use consultant representing Kade Development, said the project not only allows the developer to reap profits early from the sale of the condos but also achieves the city’s vision for the area around Diridon Station.

“The city’s Diridon Station Area plan envisions a vibrant urban, mixed-use environment bringing more people together doing different things and adding +vitality to the public streets,” Schoennauer said. “This project fulfills that vision.”

The project will provide up to 50 new jobs and generate up to $2.4 million annually in new tax revenue for the city, according to Schoennauer.

In addition to the new building, the developer has vowed to install a new crosswalk at the intersection of Julian and Stockton and provide a new bike lane on the north side of Julian east of Stockton.

Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale Opens 5 Nov 2019, 6:30 pm

Hotel News Resource | hotelnewsresource.com

OTO Development celebrated the addition of its newest Silicon Valley property with the opening of the Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale. Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale offers enhanced food and beverage options, modern and contemporary designs, and the brand’s hallmark bright and airy décor, along with exceptional service.

“We are excited to bring the Hilton Garden Inn to Sunnyvale to provide a great new option for business and leisure travelers to Silicon Valley,” said Dan Romero, general manager. “Our Team Members are ready to provide each guest with an incredible stay and an even better experience.”
Located at 767 N. Mathilda Way in Sunnyvale, the new hotel is convenient to the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s leading technology firms and is near the Shoreline Amphitheater, Levi’s Stadium, and Stanford University and Hospital.

“We’re proud to add to our growing portfolio in the Silicon Valley area to provide more options to travelers,” said Corry Oakes, CEO of OTO Development. “We look forward to partnering with the local community and becoming a great new addition to the area.”

Hilton Garden Inn has been a food and beverage leader in the upscale hotel category for more than a decade. Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale provides a great dining experience at its onsite restaurant, Kitchen at Peery Park. The restaurant and lounge brings a creative twist to California cuisine, featuring a locally sourced menu that serves up breakfast, happy hour, and casual dinner, as well as a variety of craft beer, wine, and signature cocktails*.

Each of the property’s 238 guest rooms and suites boasts the brand’s signature bedding, featuring fresh, white duvets and crisp linens; a spacious and clutter-free work desk with an ergonomic desk chair; and an in-room “hospitality center” with a mini fridge, microwave oven, and Keurig coffee maker. Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale guests will be treated to numerous amenities and services, including complimentary basic Wi-Fi throughout the property, 24-hour business center with Print Spots remote printing, a state-of-the-art fitness center, and a 24-hour Pavilion Pantry Market.

For business conferences and other events, the hotel features more than 3,000 square feet of flexible meeting space that can accommodate up to 250 people. Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale features several welcoming social spaces for small gatherings, larger meeting rooms for conferences and corporate gatherings, state-of-the-art audio-visual technology, and full-service, on-site catering.

New Tech-Driven Hospitality Catering To More Than Millenials 31 Oct 2019, 6:01 pm

By Dean Boerner | Bisnow San Francisco |  Bisnow article

The average customer for tech-savvy hospitality startups like Sonder and Yotel has expanded to beyond your average millennial, but traditional hospitality, especially in the Bay Area, isn’t worried.

For instance, micro-hotel concept Yotel, which debuted in San Francisco earlier this year, has an average guest age of “about 40,” Yotel North America Senior Vice President of Development Jason Hsiang said at Bisnow’s Bay Area Hospitality Summit last week.

Likewise, Stay Alfred (average guest age of about 42) and Sonder (37) serve a similar demographic, Stay Alfred Vice President of Real Estate Michael Kovac and Sonder Director of Real Estate Jermaine Gause said. And many guests at these well-funded startups are a great deal older.

As a result, gadgets like Yotel’s robotic luggage concierge or tools like Sonder’s mobile app to bypass traditional hotel check-ins aren’t necessarily turnoffs for older customers. They do, however, offer traditional hotels something from which to differentiate themselves, several panelists said.

“It really comes down to how you fulfill your brand promise,” Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group Senior Vice President of Development Tiffany Cooper said. “We at Kimpton think that that’s through heartfelt, human connections with your guests.”

In San Francisco and elsewhere, established hotel giants are doubling down on that advantage by repositioning long-standing hotels or creating new sub-brands entirely. Cooper says hotels are emphasizing creating more connections between guests with improved communal areas, citing Marriott’s experimentation in that regard.

In Oakland, EJF Capital is funding an example, with a new Moxy International coming to 2225 Telegraph. Moxy is a new Marriott brand with a focus on millennial travelers.

Oxford Capital is similarly buying into the Bay Area market with the idea, having purchased four longtime S.F. hotels this year, including Hotel Vertigo in Nob Hill, for repositionings.

And Braemar Hotels and Resorts Inc. will transform the Courtyard San Francisco Downtown in SoMa into The Clancy, part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, in a $30M renovation, AXIS/GFA Architecture + Design Founding Principal Architect Cory Creath, whose firm designed the rebrand, points out.

“What is the magic sauce of being able to move room rate and perhaps get an extra $100 per night?” Creath asked. One method is what Braemar is doing at 299 Second St., which is turning a select-service hotel into full-service and livening up communal space.

Hotels are also trying, and often struggling, to fully maximize food and beverage offerings as an amenity, Virgin Hotels Director of Development Vanessa Mange said.

“The industry is struggling with restaurants in general, how we make them profitable, how we make them on-trend,” Mange said. She points to Virgin’s Commons Club communal area found in its new S.F. location as one successful example of a new hotel amenity.

While traditional hospitality can’t assume it’s not facing a good deal of direct competition from Airbnb and startups like Sonder and Yotel, there is also far from perfect overlap in both target demographics, L37 Partners principal Leigh Chang says Airbnb’s offerings account for roughly 13% Chang says. Airbnbs offerings account for roughly 13% of hospitality inventory in San Francisco, for instance, according to Chang.

“We have to embrace it as the reality,” Chang said. “But what makes hotels different is we offer convenience, cleanness and amenities.”

Also, many of the people using Airbnb are more budget-conscious, so they wouldn’t have otherwise booked a hotel,” she said.

Moreover, as Gause acknowledged, San Francisco’s strict short-term rental regulations make Sonder’s normal M.O. of leasing apartment buildings difficult if not impossible, making an already difficult-to-enter hospitality market even more so for it and similar companies.

Hyatt Vice President of Real Estate and Development Kimo Bertram, who references Hyatt’s recently opened San Francisco International Airport offering and Hyatt Centric in Mountain View, says he is still bullish on traditional hotels in the Bay Area.

“I’m excited for the next 18 months,” Bertram said. “There’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines waiting for good hotel projects to invest in.”

Downtown San Jose Hotel Eyed for Arts District 17 Sep 2018, 5:16 pm

SAN JOSE — A new hotel has been proposed for downtown San Jose’ s bustling SoFA district, the latest indicator that a widening group of investors want to launch projects in the city’s urban core. The hotel, planned for the corner of South Second and East Reed streets in San Jose, would rise seven stories and contain 109 rooms, according to documents on file with city planners.

The increasingly vibrant residential, restaurant, entertainment and nightlife scene in downtown San Jose is on the minds of the new hotel’s developers, according to Jim Heilbronner, founder and president of Oakland-based Architectural Dimensions, which is designing the hotel at 605 South Second Street.

“You can see, you can feel, the transition going on in downtown San Jose,” Heilbronner said. “The city is filling up into its full growth mode.”

The future lodging place, smaller than some of the big hotels that are operating downtown, could fill a niche of inns with a cozy size that would complement the larger establishments.

“In any growing downtown, along with the major hotels, you have smaller ones that might have a lower price,” said Mark Ritchie, president of realty brokerage Ritchie Commercial.

This hotel is being planned in San Jose’s SoFA — South First Area — district. Restaurants, night spots, live theater and entertainment outlets have sprouted in the neighborhood, along with arts-related ventures. The new hotel also would be a few blocks from San Jose’s convention center.

“There’s a lot more activity in the SoFA area, and this hotel will help with that,” said Bob Staedler, principal executive with Silicon Valley Synergy, a land-use and planning consultancy. “You’re seeing a really nice vibe in the SoFA neighborhood.”

Three residential towers, a theater, and retail and dining space could rise on a site that would be a future gateway to the downtown. This project is planned for a block from the hotel site.

Also a block away, a 27-story residential tower is being planned, a development that could be the tallest building in San Jose.

“There is a lot of development going on and being planned, you can really see this is a neighborhood that’s changing,” Heilbronner said.

Already under construction are the Sparq apartments, a 105-unit residential complex with ground-floor retail, just down the street at South First and East Reed streets. Adding to the neighborhood’s rising activity is The Pierce, a new 230-unit residential development where tenants are now living.

Plans for the new hotel at 605 S. Second St. have emerged at a time when the lodging market has become robust in Silicon Valley and other parts of the Bay Area.

“There is an explosion of hospitality growth throughout the Bay Area,” Heilbronner said.

During the first four months of 2018 compared to the similar period of 2017, average revenue per available room rose 5.4 percent in Northern California and by 7.7 percent in the Santa Clara County and Peninsula areas, excluding the San Francisco airport area, according to a July 3 report released by CBRE Hotels.

Adding to the optimism are plans such as Google’s proposed transit-oriented community of offices, residences, shops, restaurants and open spaces near the Diridon train station, a development where 15,000 to 20,000 of the search giant’s employees would eventually work.

San Jose-based Adobe Systems intends to build a new office tower next to its existing three-building downtown headquarters campus, marking a big expansion fueled by major employee growth.

“The volume of downtown San Jose is filling up as it becomes more urbanized,” Heilbronner said.

Downtown San Jose Hotel and Homes Project Lands Dual Marriott Brands 17 Sep 2018, 5:10 pm

By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

SAN JOSE — A first-of-its-kind hotel and housing development for San Jose — near downtown San Jose’s Diridon train station and a future Google transit village — has landed two Marriott brands, a project consultant said Tuesday.

Courtyard by Marriott and Residence Inn by Marriott would be the two brands in the hotel, which would contain 311 rooms — and 19 for-sale residential condos — and would be built on a vacant lot at the corner of West Julian Street and Stockton Avenue in San Jose.

“In the City of San Jose, there is no building that has a dual-brand hotel plus residential units,” said Erik Schoennauer, principal executive and partner with Schoennauer Company, a land-use and planning consultancy that is advising the project’s developer. “The project will support the goals of the city’s Diridon Station plan and the Alameda Urban Village plan.”

The residential units would be located on the top floor of the nine-story hotel.

This development represents the first new downtown San Jose hotel development on the west side of State Route 87 in decades, according to Schoennauer. If approved, it would be the closest hotel to Diridon Station.

The hotel and residential project is being developed by Texas-based Kade Development and the designer is Oakland-based Architectural Dimensions.

The combination of hotel rooms and residences would likely make sense, said Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association.

“It’s an intriguing concept,” Knies said. “The hotel rooms, the residences are compatible.”

The hotel development also helps to widen the concept of the boundaries of downtown San Jose.

“This will be a lot of hotel rooms, and the development would help put a stake in the ground at the northwest edges of the downtown,” Knies said.

Likewise, the Google project and a nearby mega-office campus of 1 million square feet proposed by developers TMG Partners and Valley Oak Partners will, if built, create a dynamic connection between the traditional downtown core and the new frontiers on its western boundaries.

Before the hotel and housing construction could begin, the proposal would need a rezoning approved by the San Jose City Council as well as a planned development permit issued by city staffers.

“The idea is to have a dense, urban, mixed-use development in a walkable, transit-oriented neighborhood,” Schoennauer said.

The hotel and housing would be within a stroll of the transit station, SAP Center, the future Google transit village, the proposed Platform 16 office campus development, Whole Foods and restaurants on The Alameda.

Just down the street from the new hotel project, Google’s planned development would include office buildings where 15,000 to 20,000 of the search giant’s employees would eventually work, along with homes, shops, restaurants and open spaces.

Also not far away from the planned hotel, Adobe Systems has launched a dramatic expansion of its three-building downtown headquarters with a plan to construct an adjacent fourth office tower to accommodate a fast-expanding workforce.

“There is a lot nearby for the business traveler and for the leisure traveler,” Schoennauer said. “You have all the museums and cultural facilities of downtown San Jose very close by.”

Agency Management 5 Jun 2018, 8:05 am

Hilton Garden Inn Time-lapse Video, Sunnyvale, CA 18 May 2018, 5:07 pm

Its underway ! The foundation for a new 238 room Hilton Garden Hotel is moving quickly.

Just west of Highway 101 on Mathilda, OTO Development is bringing to the heart of Sunnyvale a creative solution, designed by Architectural Dimensions. Taking cues from surrounding residential neighborhoods, the new hotel contains features that will unfold over the next 16 months of construction – more for us to show and tell. The hotel has a collection of amenities including pool, meeting rooms and restaurant on a narrow site that requires the building to “step” away from Mathilda as the building cascades upward to its 6 story height.

Club Knoll, Oakland, CA 30 Mar 2018, 3:04 pm

130 Years and Counting

Reconstructed Courtyard

The “last building standing” on the old Oak Knoll Navy Hospital site is the Officer’s Club, once the Oak Knoll Golf Course Club House. Following closure of the Navy Base in 1996 the site has been in a planning mode by SunCal for redevelopment to a mixed-use residential community. Over the past 10 years, all buildings and structures have been removed from the site except… the historic Club House that was the center of controversy during the planning phase. Opposing forces debated restoration of the building, in its current location, versus full demolition to make way for new homes.

Architectural Dimensions suggested relocation of the building to a central point of the new community to be used as the Community Center. The “last building standing” will become the first building completed in the Project without loss of its architectural elements but refitted with new contemporary building systems. It will be the old with the new to preserve a piece of history while injecting new life to sustain future decades, to serve the community.

Architectural Dimensions is leading the team to move the 130 year old building in 4 major parts along a ½ mile path of travel, to be placed on a new foundation on a new site that mimics the topography and surrounds of the existing site. New engineering systems, life safety systems and accessibility improvements will be installed to facilitate code compliant use of the building for community functions. We hope to see completion of construction in Fall of 2020, the start of the building’s “third life”.

Courtyard Marriott Redwood City, CA 15 Mar 2018, 3:29 pm

The new Marriott Courtyard is now open in Redwood City conveniently located off Highway 101. The building, raised above 2 parking levels, gives all 177 guest rooms great views in all directions. A great hotel for meetings and get-togethers, is surrounded by walking and bike trails with internal fitness center, pool, bar and numerous private seating areas.

The New Mandela Hotel, Oakland, CA 27 Feb 2018, 4:42 pm

A triangular design solution on a very difficult 1-acre site. This dual brand hotel of 222 rooms with underground parking will occupy a historically industrial site in Oakland on the border of Emeryville and the 880 / 80 freeway maze. A great land use for a site that has great freeway access and downtown Oakland.

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