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By Nathan Peck | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS — The city’s newest hotel is working to blend old and new.

CityFlats Hotel Grand Rapids, the newest hotel from Holland-based Charter House Innovations, is brining new life to a long-forgotten space along Monroe Center in downtown Grand Rapids. The 28-room boutique hotel is opening amid a push to be one of the greenest hotels in West Michigan.

The project reunites Charter House with the construction manager GDK Construction and architectural firm GMB Architects, both of which worked on the first CityFlats Hotel in Holland. Nestled inside the former Fox Jewelers building in Grand Rapids’ downtown, the hotel is a showcase for how the CityFlats brand can be applied in a renovated space.

The project is seeking the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification, and made efforts to reuse as much of the building’s original contents as possible. Stepping just beyond the CityFlats lobby into the bar, one sees the original Fox Jewelry sign backlit behind translucent panels. Incorporating these elements were a way to keep a modern development connected with its links to the past, said Chuck Reid, president of Charter House Innovations.

“We worked to reclaim as much of the original structure as possible with the LEED criteria in mind,” Reid told MiBiz. “When we used (reclaimed materials), we wanted to make it as prominent as possible.”

CityFlats Hotel in downtown Grand Rapids is Charter House Innovations’ second hotel and serves as a test bed for the company’s interior and furniture design ideas. PHOTO: NATHAN PECK

Elsewhere, timber beams from the fifth floor were reused, planed into sheets that now form the walls of the lobby. Portions of the marble façade were reused for shelving in other areas of the hotel.

The original building was constructed in two phases, with the first three floors constructed in the late 19th century and two additional floors added in the 1910s. The result was a mix of building materials and styles, with load-bearing masonry being blended with steel frame and timber construction.

To say that redevelopment projects in urban centers are a challenge is somewhat an understatement, said Magda Smolenska, project manager at GMB.

“To begin with, the building had been abandoned for a few years. It had significant water damage and had been falling apart for some time,” Smolenska said. “The challenges were fitting the owner’s program into that small space and trying to bring that entire building up to code, incorporating an exit stair tower and updated elevators into a tight space.”

Smolenska credits a strong working relationship among GMB, GDK and Charter House, as well as with the city of Grand Rapids, with helping keep the project on schedule.

“We made it work. The inspectors for the city of Grand Rapids had been really helpful in helping us navigate the code carefully,” Smolenska said. “At lot more calculations were needed because it is such an unusual building. Knowing that GDK and the design team from Charter House were a part of the process, we learned to anticipate each other and learned to work together. There were so many things that popped up week to week that that partnership helped with the speed of construction.”

Kara Slater, project manager for GDK Construction, said that working in a tight urban site required a great deal of collaboration between the design team and contractors.

“That building was a challenge in staging. Trying to build a 5-story hotel without a place for staging was difficult,” Slater said. “It has a very small footprint and is not very wide, so there was not any room to move around. With this tall and skinny of a building, the challenge was trying to find a place to put everything.”

Reid credits reuniting the team for helping the project come together successfully.

“The greatest strength of this project was that we were able to put the same team together. They know how we operated — we operate differently from most customers,” Reid said. “Because of that, we could make a smoother transition from the old building to the new.”