Chis unveil plan for LR hotel

Historic Boyle Building to become 144-room Aloft

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK MCFARLAND --04/14/14--  Jacob Chi announces Monday that his family will convert the historic Boyle Building, Capitol Ave. and S. Main St., into a hotel with the name Aloft Hotel.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK MCFARLAND --04/14/14-- Jacob Chi announces Monday that his family will convert the historic Boyle Building, Capitol Ave. and S. Main St., into a hotel with the name Aloft Hotel.

Correction: The Aloft hotel to be built in the Boyle Building on Main Street in Little Rock will produce an estimated taxable income base of $85 million to $90 million over a 20-year period, Jacob Chi of the Chi Hotel Group LLC said. The period of time was incorrectly reported in this article.

The Chi Hotel Group LLC announced Monday that the 105-year-old Boyle Building at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue will become a 144-room Aloft hotel, the latest project on a resurgent Main.

Standing in what will become part of the lobby, Jacob Chi said his family and its investment group would not settle for less than a perfect match to meet the needs of the cultural and creative arts that will define Main Street.

Dozens of hotel brands were examined before the group settled on Aloft and signed a 20-year agreement with Starwood Hotels and Resorts, he said.

“We demanded the absolute best brand” to fit Main Street, Chi said. It caters to the “next-generation traveler” and has technology to match.

The group purchased the Boyle Building, which had been part of the original plan for the mixed-use Main Street Lofts, for $4.6 million last month. The total cost will be $18 million, Chi said.

Sharon Priest, executive director of the Little Rock Downtown Partnership, said after the news conference that the plan is “very good for downtown. It sounds like the Chi family wants to be involved in other things downtown, and that’s a good thing.

“They’re experienced in the restaurant business and the hotel business as well.”

Iberia Bank provided financing and East-Harding Inc. of Little Rock will be the general contractor. The group has employed Tommy Jameson, a Little Rock architect who specializes in historical restoration. Dallas-based One Group Design is the overall architect.

The group has not selected an operator for the hotel, Chi said.

Work will begin in about five months, with completion expected in early 2016, he said.

Plans call for a 3,500-square-foot upscale restaurant and a separate coffee shop at street level, Chi said. He offered no details on them, though he said the coffee shop will be a “very popular brand.” There will be a pool and outdoor lounge area atop the 12-story building.

Speaking of the social aspects of the hotel, Chi said, “We fully expect this to be a great place for weddings.” He said it’s in the “DNA” of the hotel to be a venue for performing arts and artists. The Arkansas Repertory Theatre, Arkansas Symphony and Ballet Arkansas will lease space in the Main Street Lofts. Additionally, there will be an art gallery.

There will be 4,000 square feet of meeting space in the hotel, which will have entrances on Main and Capitol.

Chi said the lobby and restaurant will reflect the Aloft style, which has been described as 21st century modern.

The hotel “sounds like a perfect fit” for the Main Street Lofts, Michael “Doc” Terry, a professor at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida , said in an interview earlier this year.

Those 68 loft apartments will have an urban, industrial style and are expected to be complete in the summer in the three other contiguous buildings on the west side of Main between the Boyle Building and Sixth Street.

The Aloft style is “a cute little concept,” Terry said. It’s “very different from anything else you have in Little Rock, I assure you.”

“It’s definitely [for] young people, but it’s not economy,” Terry said.

Chi said the hotel’s operations will produce an annual taxable income base of $85 million to $90 million.

Terry said in an interview Monday that figure sounds ambitious. And that evidently the Chi Group negotiated with Starwood to include a large restaurant, rather than a minimal eatery, which is typically the case in the Aloft brand.

And the 4,000 square feet of banquet space is also much larger than in a typical Aloft. The Aloft brand is comparable to Marriott’s Courtyard, Terry said.

The Boyle Building, with its steel-and-concrete construction, is considered an early skyscraper. The group will apply for a federal tax income credit for historic structures equaling 20 percent of the cost of the restoration, plus another 25 percent under the state income-tax program. It was designed by Little Rock architect George Mann, who was responsible for shaping a number of buildings in the city.

The applications for the building will be reviewed by the National Park Service and the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.

The Aloft will continue a trend of hotel development in Little Rock, with it being the sixth hotel planned or already built downtown in the past decade.

The Chi family already owns two hotels in west Little Rock, the Ramada Limited and the Candlewood Suites, Chi said. The family also owns five restaurants.

The family, which emigrated from Taiwan in 1984, includes parents Bill and Lulu Chi and sons Jasen, a rheumatologist, and Jacob, a civil engineer.

The hotel, which some observers say will be the first on Main in 80 years or longer, will be the fifth major project on Main or just off Main in the past two years.

Main Street redevelopment began with the reclamation of the old Blass Department Store warehouse at 315 Main by a limited liability group headed by Scott Reed of Portland, Ore. A nightclub and restaurant was opened on the ground level and below street level in 2012. It is now called Level. The K Lofts apartments on the upper floors are expected to be on the market by the summer.

Across the street, Moses and Tucker and the Doyle Rogers Co. opened last year the Mann on Main, a mixed-use building that had been a Blass Department Store. It includes the first living space created on Main in the current resurrection of the street, 19 loft apartments, most of which are above Bruno’s Little Italy, a popular institution among Little Rock restaurants for more than 60 years, office space and retail space.

More recently, a development group named Terraforma Inc., whose managing partner is Doug Meyer, announced that the Fulk Building at the corner of Main and Third would be turned into the new home for Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods, the state’s largest public relations and advertising agency.

The agency plans to move to the new location in mid- to late 2015. The building across the street from the Fulk, which had been home to Mr. Cool for nearly four decades, will be rebuilt and a second floor added. The street level will be home to Jones Film Video , a subsidiary of Cranford Johnson.

Despite the rapid redevelopment going on now on Main Street, Chi said he would like to see it accelerate.

He said he hopes the hotel will ignite further development on and near Main, and suggested that the Chi family may have other projects in mind.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/15/2014

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