Developer Mike Wampold is celebrating the opening today of his newest hotel, The Watermark Baton Rouge, with a ribbon cutting at 11 a.m. followed by a luncheon, though the 144-room property won’t be accepting guest reservations until this weekend.
“We’re going to have to put it off for a couple of days until we’re sure everything is ready,” Wampold says. “When you’re retrofitting an old building it’s a lot more challenging than building new so there are just a lot of little things that sometimes you don’t see until the last minute.”
Whether the hotel will be able to accept guests for Saturday’s LSU home football game remains up in the air. But Wampold isn’t letting the last-minute delays dampen the ribbon-cutting festivities. The project has been three years in the making and was hard fought. Now that it’s done, he believes it will become a leader in an increasingly competitive hotel market.
“We’re optimistic,” he says. “We’re a full-service hotel and will be going after the upper end business traveler. We think we’ll do well in that space.”
Wampold has invested more than $32 million in the project since first acquiring the site—the nearly 90-year-old Louisiana Trust and Savings Bank building at 150 Third St.—more than three years ago. The property, which became known as the Old LNB Building and later housed state government offices, is a city landmark and features historic artwork and architectural details.
The Watermark is a Marriott Autograph hotel, a high-end brand of full-service boutique hotels that fly the Marriott flag. Wampold, whose Renaissance Hotel on Bluebonnet Boulevard is the only four-star hotel in the market, says The Watermark will be competing in the higher end segment of the market. Rooms, initially, will be in the range of $159 per night.
“We’re a Marriott hotel and there isn’t another Marriott product downtown,” he says. “Marriott is the big gorilla in the hotel business and we’ll be the only one for our first year in operation.”
A Courtyard Marriott under development by a competing hotel group, Windsor Aughtry, will be located just one block down from The Watermark on a now vacant parking lot at the intersection of Florida Street. That hotel breaks ground Thursday and is expected to take about 15 months to complete.
Since Wampold began planning for The Watermark the area’s economic landscape has changed, and not necessarily for the better. Oil prices have plummeted, the state’s budget crisis has intensified and the area recently experienced flooding.
“We don’t really know yet what the effect of all that will be,” Wampold says.
At the same time, downtown in those three years has become more vibrant, with the addition of hundreds of new apartment units, a full-service supermarket and dozens of new businesses and restaurants.
“Downtown is blowing and going and more people want to be down there than ever,” he says. “So that is a good sign. We feel good.”
The Watermark’s restaurant, The Gregory, will open for business with the hotel in the coming days. Milford’s on Third, a deli named for Wampold’s grandfather that will front Third Street, will open later this month or in early November. Greenwood Hospitality Group is managing the property.
—Stephanie Riegel
