Largest Hotel in PNW to Debut in 2018

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

A rendering of the Hyatt Regency Seattle lobby.

The eight-story podium for the 45-story, 1.4-million-square-foot Hyatt Regency Seattle now under construction in downtown Seattle has been topped off. The announcement came late last week from LMN Architects, the tower’s designers. At 1,260 rooms, the 1.4 million-square-foot hotel will be the largest in the Pacific Northwest once it’s completed in 2018.

The 40-story project, at 8th and 9th avenues between Stewart and Howell streets, began construction in July 2015, but was only announced as a Hyatt Regency property last October.

The building as a whole consists of two primary volumes: a semi-detached, eight-story podium bisected at street level by a mid-block connector and a 37-story tower. The podium will provide 105,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space integrated with a two-story base featuring a restaurant and the hotel lobby. The podium will also feature a rooftop terrace, a glass-enclosed fitness center and a club lounge.

A series of transparent spaces in the base, including the lobby, porte-cochere, restaurants, bars and shops, is intended to engage the city at street level. The second level will feature additional retail, including a grab-and-go market, a large bar and restaurant, and expanded lobby lounge space for hotel and meeting guests.

LEED Gold certification is anticipated for the project.

In addition to LMN and developer R.C. Hedreen Co., the project team includes Zena Design Group (hotel room and lobby design), Sellen Construction, Berger Partnership (landscape architecture), CPL (civil engineering), MKA (structural engineering) and Arup (MEP engineering).

Downtown Seattle’s hotels have completed five straight years of record performance, with an estimated 2016 market occupancy rate for the upscale tier at 84 percent, the highest annual rate in more than 30 years, according to a fourth-quarter 2016 report from Kidder Mathews. In addition, the Seattle CBD is enjoying an average daily room rate of $218 and daily RevPAR of $182, both up about 4 percent from 2015.

The downside, per Kidder Mathews, is that such a robust market has been attracting substantial new development, so that expanding supply might outpace demand growth, “resulting in lower occupancy rates and more competitive pricing.”

Renderings by LMN Architects