It has been exactly two years since South Carolina-based Windsor Aughtry Hotel Group announced plans to develop a Courtyard Marriott Hotel on an 80,000-square-foot surface parking lot at the corner of Florida and Third streets downtown. Today, the developers finally celebrated the groundbreaking of the 135-room project.
“We’ve had a few little hurdles,” says developer Paul “Bo” Aughtry. “But the important thing is we’re here now.”
The hotel’s timeline, which is about 18 months behind schedule, got thrown off in 2015, when political machinations at the Metro Council level threatened the developer’s ability to secure Tax Increment Financing to help fund the project. The council initially voted down the hotel’s TIF request and then delayed a reconsideration for three months, eventually approving it last October.
It took nearly another year before the project could move forward because the developers redesigned much of the hotel in an effort to curb costs amidst the escalating prices of supplies and materials.
Despite the delays, Aughtry says he is still optimistic about the downtown hotel market, which has changed significantly since Windsor Aughtry began first planning the project.
On one hand, two other hotels have since opened downtown, which makes for more competition. On the other hand, with hundreds of new apartment units downtown, and dozens of new restaurants and retail establishments, demand for downtown hotel rooms is almost inevitable.
“Downtown has a renaissance that you can see and feel, and that is what we look for when we build urban hotels,” says Aughtry, whose firm also developed the downtown Hampton Inn. “Downtown Baton Rouge is still getting to where it will get so the amount of demand downtown is not what it will be in the future, but we think it is a very good long-term marketplace.”
The Courtyard by Marriott represents a $23.6 million investment, and is expected to open in late 2017 with an anticipated staff of 50 full-time and 10 part-time employees. The hotel will comprise approximately 80,000 square feet of space with a Starbucks on the ground level.
Aughtry says the hotel will be priced competitively with the Hampton Inn and slightly below a nearby Marriott Autograph hotel, The Watermark, that opened a block down Third Street just last week.
The property is the site of the former Istrouma Hotel, which served as the city’s first downtown hotel. Built in 1903, the Istrouma closed in 1961 and was eventually razed in 1969.
The new hotel was designed by Memphis-based Bounds & Gillespie Architects and is being built by Alexandria-based Ratcliff Construction Company.
—Stephanie Riegel
