A Denver-based developer broke ground on a 120-room hotel slated to be part of its mixed-use Railspur project in Seattle's Pioneer Square.
Hotel Westland, a boutique property designed to include a ground-level retail, micro-apartments, offices, restaurants and a rooftop bar, is projected to open at 100 S. King St. in summer 2024, developer Urban Villages said in a statement.
The hotel is part of RailSpur, a "micro-district" that also includes an eight-story office at 419 Occidental Ave. and residential units with retail at 115 S. Jackson St. and alleyways that connect the three historic buildings.
Hotel Westland, designed by The Miller Hull Partnership architecture firm, will be operated by Aparium Hotel Group.
Urban Villages designed the RailSpur development to be climate-negative, which means that the property goes beyond achieving net-zero carbon emissions to remove additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Hotel Westland and Populus, a 265-room hotel expected to be completed by Urban Villages next year in Denver, are the first two of what the developer calls the first two "carbon-positive" hotels of their kind in the United States.
"The greenest building is one you don’t have to build from the ground up," Urban Villages CEO and co-founder Grant McCargo said in the statement. "With adaptive reuse, we’ve modernized the building and honored its heritage, all while minimizing environmental impact.”
The Westland is being built in the face of a slow recovery of downtown Seattle's hotel market since deep declines in occupancy during the pandemic, according to a CoStar analytics report.
The recovery has been slow due to the heavy dependence on tech giants with a major presence in the central business district such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and RedFin. Those companies and others have reduced corporate travel since the pandemic, and have also announced thousands of layoffs in recent months.
Downtown Seattle's 12-month average hotel occupancy through April was about 67%, compared with annual occupancy near or above 80% from 2013 to 2019.