Shamin News

Where biscuits once rose for decades, a new hotel is set to rise much, much higher.

Shamin Hotels, one of the region’s largest hoteliers, is planning a 12-story, 299-room hotel on the site of the longtime Hardee’s restaurant at 921 Myers St.

The new, 257,000-square-foot structure would carry two Marriott brands: Residence Inn and AC Hotels. The latter is one of Marriott’s “Select” brands and originated in Spain. Shamin CEO Neil Amin said AC Hotels have many European-inspired design elements.

Neil Amin

“They’re very elegant, very modern with clean lines and a lot of great finishes like stone,” Amin said. “Marriott typically wants (AC Hotels) in neighborhoods that have other things that people want to visit, like breweries and restaurants. They’re not really looking to put these hotels in suburban office parks.”

There are nearly 250 AC Hotels worldwide and Shamin’s would be the first in Virginia.

Shamin, based downtown, owns 75 hotels throughout the East Coast. The majority of its holdings are in the Richmond region.

Amin said the in-house restaurant is a big part of the AC Hotels brand, and added that the restaurant in the new Richmond hotel would have dining areas both on the ground floor and on the roof with a lounge and bar. Event spaces are also part of the plan, including a 10,000-square-foot ballroom and on the rooftop.

A seven-floor, 370-space above-ground parking deck is planned as part of the project.

The hotel would be the first AC Hotel in Virginia.

The new hotel would be among the largest and tallest both in Shamin’s portfolio and throughout the city. Shamin bought the land for $4.75 million last summer after Hardee’s closed in 2022, and Amin said the company set out to maximize the potential of the 1.3-acre parcel.

“We’ve been trying to do something in Scott’s Addition for some time and the stars aligned. We had to move quickly on this site,” Amin said. “We could have found a site deep into Scott’s Addition, but the visibility of Broad and Boulevard as a gateway to Scott’s Addition and the Boulevard district was very important to us.”

Amin said the company also wanted to be near the many museums in the area, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Science Museum of Virginia and Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

“There’s not a great hotel option for people to use when they’re visiting those locations,” Amin said. “I’ve been in conversations with those (museums’) directors and they’re all very excited to have a hotel and hospitality product close by.”

Shamin is preparing to work through the plan of development process with the city for the Myers Street project. The parcel’s existing TOD-1 zoning allows for up to 12 stories and won’t require a special-use permit or rezoning to move forward.

Timmons Group is the development engineer and Nitin Kulkarni is the architect. Amin said a general contractor has not yet been selected, nor has the company finalized a project cost or construction timeline.

Amin said he views this new hotel as a potential trophy-type of development for Shamin’s portfolio. He said the firm is drawing inspiration from an AC Hotel that opened in a neighborhood similar to Scott’s Addition in Asheville, North Carolina.

“They have a hotel right in the middle of their downtown area, which is very similar to Scott’s Addition with lots of breweries, and the hotel just became the centerpiece of the development,” Amin said. “People would go there, they know that’s where they’ll stay, and then they frequent all the local establishments. So we want to replicate that and improve on that here.”

Another local hotelier, KM Hotels, tried to build an AC Hotel downtown along the Kanawha Canal in 2019. Those plans ultimately were scrapped and local developers WVS Cos. and Fountainhead Real Estate Development now are planning to build the final phase of their Locks apartments on that site.

While Shamin’s hotel will tower over the intersection of West Broad and Arthur Ashe Boulevard, additional hotel projects are in the works in the vicinity.

A 180-room hotel is included in the plans for the massive Diamond District development to the north. On Roseneath Road in Scott’s Addition, local development firm Capital Square is considering razing the old Dairy Barn building to make way for an eight-story hotel.

South of Broad Street in the Fan, two boutique hotels are in the works: a New York firm is converting the Shenandoah building at 501 N. Allen Ave. into a 70-room hotel, and the owners of Shyndigz are building a four-story, 19-room hotel adjacent to their new bakery at 1904 W. Cary St.

This article was originally published on Richmond Bizsense, read here.