Later this year, Cascade Hotel Kansas City, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel, will open on the Country Club Plaza. It will join its adjacent seven-story sister hotel, Aloft Kansas City Country Club Plaza, which opened earlier this year. Combined, the Marriott properties add 297 hotel rooms to the market.
A panel of participants on the dual hotel project, including Kirk Chonis, AIA, project architect, DLR Group, Brian Daniels, associate, Smith & Boucher, Inc., Justin Kunkle, P.E., senior project manager, PMA Engineering, and Joe Morrison, vice president, shareholder, Capital Management, Inc., joined moderator Brian Murch, hospitality design director and principal, DLR Group, to discuss the project at a recent event hosted by the Kansas City chapter of DBIA Mid-America Region.
INTERIOR IMAGE CREDIT: DLR GROUP
The 10-story Cascade Hotel is designed as a tribute to Kansas City, and specifically its connection to water and fountains for which Kansas City is famous.
“Cascade Hotel is a play on the water, City of Fountains, and you’ll see a lot of that throughout the hotel,” said Morrison.
Morrison described the project as a mixed-use property. The Cascade will have a restaurant, and Capital Management recently signed a lease for a third-party spa which will occupy approximately 6,000 SF. He said the hotel and spa will do “collaborative stuff” within the hotel. There also is some unique office space for which a tenant, which Morrison declined to identify, has been found. In addition, there will be a rooftop bar.
When the project started, Capital Management envisioned that one of the towers would be apartments, rather than a second hotel.
“The evolution has been interesting, but all of those play into what we hope is one of the coolest hotels in Kansas City. I can’t name one that would be a direct competitor. There are other hotels on the Plaza that are great, but none of them are really mixed-use. Their sole purpose is hotel and/or event meeting space, but they don’t have other associated uses,” Morrison said.
Murch said dual-brand hotel projects have been around for approximately the last five years (and DLR even is working on a tri-brand in San Diego). He emphasized that there is great synergy with programming between the multiple hotels.
The hotels will share a 300-space underground parking garage, construction of which involved a 60-foot-deep excavation, according to Kunkle. They also will share a fitness center.
“More importantly on the operations side, you think about the laundry facilities. You’ve got one laundry facility that captures both of those hotels. So instead of building them independently, and incurring that cost, you can imagine the savings that you start to capture as having that as a dual-brand,” said Murch.
According to Daniels, the Cascade will feature some unique lighting that creates a feeling of water.
“We lit a lot of the exterior from the top down instead of the bottom up to kind of create that effect of how waterfalls work, the turbulent water flow would spread out as it went down below. And, the commissioning of it is going to have some element of movement,” Daniels said.
In designing the Cascade Hotel, Chonis said his team focused on three design pillars. The first was modernizing contextual character, weaving Plaza elements into the design, including using terra cotta elements.
“As a requirement of the City, we have to pull in some colorful tiles, we have to have some metal work---so our goal really was to take that and modernize it texturally for this environment. This hotel is a little bit more modern and progressive in its style . . . and it’s a good contrast while also being cohesive with the Plaza,” said Chonis.
Chonis described the second design pillar as a borderless curiosity. Like water, which is fluid, the interior spaces have no borders.
“We’ve got a large grand stair that takes you from the main area up to the ballroom. There are some cool spaces to go explore and experience . . . . and find some cool stuff that you may not expect to find. The finishes also overlap in some areas where maybe you’d have a corridor that would be just a continuous finish or carpet. This thing starts to pull you into these different areas. The ceiling elements start to curve. There’s all those unexpected items in there,” he said.
The last design pillar is a reimagined function that was inspired by the water scheme of the Plaza.
“What we’re trying to really do with this hotel is reimagine the purpose of what a fountain was. At some points, it was something to provide people with hope. It also provided life. And that’s really what we think about this hotel. It’s a recharge for folks visiting and folks here in Kansas City. Just like you would throw a penny into a fountain as a symbol of hope, we have copper elements that start to pull into the columns. That story is continuous and weaved into everything,” said Chonis.
Chonis said the Kansas City market has been a little insulated because of its steady and slow growth.
“The whole game has changed, and a lot of it is about that experience and how people, not only visitors but hopefully everybody in Kansas City will see this hotel as a testament to the intricacies and unique pieces that Kansas City has to offer,” he said.
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FEATURE IMAGE CREDIT: DLR GROUP