Jernigan asks Bungalower about the Orange & Colonial Hotel that was approved downtown:
I put 2 and 2 together that this will likely be a Residence Inn – but either way, any timeline on demo of existing building (red one, not Mama B) would be exciting to hear.
Jernigan is correct back in May the Municipal Planning Board approved a new hotel to go in at the corner of Orange Ave and Colonial Dr. [GMap]. As he points out the hotel will go into the empty space along Colonial Dr and replace the existing office building on Orange Ave but will not be on the Mama B’s property.
We also had heard that the Orange & Colonial Hotel would be a Residence Inn by Marriott in Downtown Orlando. We reached out to Craig Uster who is developing the hotel to ask for more details and again Jernigan is spot on:
Yes, 138 room Residence Inn by Marriott Hotel, breaking ground in the next month or two. We are in for permitting and ready to get started. It will take us about 14 months to build it so we are looking at late 2014 or early 2015 opening. This is a good-looking urban mid-rise project that will be a nice addition to north downtown. There is a 4,000 SF restaurant planned for the ground floor.
The $21 million seven-story hotel will be quite a nice change for our northern gateway of Downtown Orlando. For the Orlando History folks we aren’t aware of any plans to call the Residence Inn the Orange Court Motor Lodge.
We’ll be sure to let you know once construction starts on the Residence Inn by Marriott at Orange and Colonial in Downtown Orlando.
Here’s a look at the site layout. Keep in mind that the middle area is a parking garage and not a surface lot. The first four floors will be parking with a pool on top of part of the parking and the hotel on top of the rest of the parking structure. The 4,000 square feet of restaurant space that Ustler talks about would face Orange Ave.
And a view from the southwest:
And a view from the Northwest:
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GrahamMernatsi The office is completely gone now. Lofts are set to stay. https://bungalower.com/2014/01/demolition-begins-new-downtown-hotel/
Would be nice if they could have stuck a deal in buying Mama B’s lot, demolish the single-story building and parking lot, and build a 4 to 8 story (the hotel looks like it’s 8 stories) mixed commercial/office building in its place. Mama B’s can then be brought back as the corner shop on the retail floor.
I was worried upon hearing that the red building would be demolished, at first I thought it was the historic red warehouse/loft building next to the tracks, but it appears to be the red brick office building behind Mama B’s. That office building I don’t care for, but I don’t want to see the warehouse go.