New Year’s Eve send-off planned for Hotel Georgia
Ashley Ford
Province
A “grande dame” of Vancouver hotels will dim its lights early in the new year.
But fear not, within three years or so, the elegant, 80-year-old Hotel Georgia will be reborn as a luxury boutique hotel with approximately 247 rooms, plus a 48-storey, 146-metre tower with 156 condos and 60,000 square feet of office space.
Bruce Langereis, president of Delta Land Development Ltd., said the $275-million renovation will make it “the hotel of the city” once again.
Delta, a subsidiary of the Singapore-based Delta group, is developing the property with partner Goodman Real Estate Inc. of Seattle, a private company.
Langereis is planning a gala send-off for the heritage hotel on New Year’s Eve and it will officially close on Jan. 2.
It is hoped the Howe and Georgia hotel portion of the project will be open in time for the Winter Olympics, he said.
The tower site next to the hotel is small and is a difficult one to develop. And that portion of the project may not be completed by the time the Games roll around.
Redevelopment of the site has long been on the drawing boards. Bing Thom, a well-known Vancouver architect, designed a spectacular crystal tower for previous owners that did not proceed.
“We have completely redesigned it to enable us to put in underground parking and join the tower to the hotel in a much better way,” Langereis said.
“A critical part of the new design is increasing our heritage commitment. We want to be respectful of the history here.”
That will include tearing down the old ballroom to integrate the hotel to the tower, but ultimately remaking it much as it was in the hotel’s glory days, albeit with a modern touch.
“The ballroom will be carefully taken apart to be later reconstructed the way it was originally,” he said.
In addition, the hotel, a heritage building, will get a $16-million seismic upgrade that will mean it will be around for another 80 or so years, Langereis said.
Other touches will include a huge, new state-of-the-art kitchen; an upgraded pub, long a central element of the hotel; a swimming pool; port cochere — a porch large enough for a carriage to pass through — and a restaurant. No rezoning will be required, he said.
The project will be made as environmentally-friendly as possible, Langereis said.
Bores drilled into the earth will provide geothermal energy for heating and cooling and solar panels will be installed on the southern side of the new tower to use clean, free energy.
The project is being designed by IBI/HB Architects and Endall/Elliot Associates of Vancouver.
Built in 1927, the 312-room,
12-storey hotel was the second largest in the city and the darling of many international celebrities, including Frank Sinatra and the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn.
© The Vancouver Province 2006