Carmel Partners has secured a massive construction loan as part of its planned redevelopment of one of the largest hotel sites in Washington, D.C., into apartments.
The company obtained $360 million from Wells Fargo for its proposed remake of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in the city's Woodley Park neighborhood into a 900-unit apartment complex, according to documents filed last week with the D.C. Recorder of Deeds.
Early last year, Carmel applied for a concept review to raze and replace the vacant hotel and conference facilities with a pair of 90-foot residential towers built around a central courtyard. News of the construction loan was reported earlier by Bisnow.
Carmel Partners paid $152.5 million in 2021 to acquire Wardman Park, a historic, 1,153-room hotel that sold at auction after Wardman Hotel Owner LLC, an affiliate of Pacific Life Insurance Co., closed the hotel in March 2020 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Former hotel owner JBG Cos., a predecessor company to Bethesda, Maryland-based firm JBG Smith, had itself pitched a residential conversion path for the hotel in 2016, proposing to redevelop the site with roughly 1,500 multifamily units to capitalize on its location in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. That project was met with strong opposition from the neighborhood, which feared a development of that size would overwhelm local schools, emergency response efforts and transit systems.
The current proposal has also received pushback from local organizations, according to Bisnow, with community groups and the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission saying that the development would be better served as affordable housing.
Construction permits for the new project are under review with the city, Bisnow said.