LITTLE ROCK — The folks who show up at today’s groundbreaking ceremony for Bentonville’s 21c Museum Hotel will have a chance to see an architect’s rendering of what the luxury hotel will look like when it opens in 2013.
The four-story, 104-room hotel will be the third for 21c Museum Hotel owners Laura Lee Brown and her husband, Steve Wilson, both of Kentucky. Brown is the great granddaughter of Old Forester Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky founder George Garvin Brown.
The owners of the hotel at the corner of NE A and Blake streets are pinning its success on the recent opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a museum created by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. stockholder Alice Walton.
Crystal Bridges has been projected to attract between 150,000 to 300,000 visitors a year.
The 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville will be a fiveminute walk to Crystal Bridges and is designed as a lodging destination for wealthy tourists.
“Even though we’re building a new modern design, our team went to great lengths to have the new building complement the wonderful historic character of the [Bentonville] town square,” Craig Greenberg, a 21c Museum Hotel vice chairman, said in a conference call Monday. “The material selected for the exterior ... it was all de- signed to complement town square.”
Rooms at the 21c Museum Hotel will be priced competitively for a full-service hotel, 21c spokesman Stephanie Greene wrote in an email Monday. She declined to confirm the company’s previously disclosed rate of $190 per night.
The project will be completed in January 2013.
Hotel construction activity has dropped nationally since the financial crisis of 2007. The market is characterized as being about 50 percent of what it was four years ago, Chuck Pinkowski of hotel consulting firm Pinkowski & Company in Memphis said.
A luxury hotel is an extremely difficult project to finance and “any luxury hotel project being built today tends to be in major markets,” he said, mentioning Dallas, New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
Brown and Wilson are developing the 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville through a partnership that includes members of the Walton family and a booster group, Bentonville Revitalization Inc.
“The project will be a combination of equity and a construction loan by Arvest Bank,” Greenberg said.
Arvest, Arkansas’ largest bank, is headquartered in Bentonville. Jim Walton, Alice Walton’s brother, is chairman and chief executive officer.
The state’s economic development commission also approved the group for its tourism development program, which, upon meeting certain criteria, will refund sales tax revenue, Greenberg said.
Wilson is betting on increased demand for hotel rooms by the time his hotel opens and he also expects rising rates due to Crystal Bridges, which opened in November.
Occupancy rates in Bentonville hovered around 50 percent through the month of October, according to data from Smith Travel Research in Hendersonville, Tenn., which benchmarks national hotel information.
Bentonville’s average daily rate for a hotel room through October was $69.16.
The luxury occupancy rate ran higher nationally at 71 percent with an average daily rate of $254.88, according to Smith Travel Research data.
“I’m convinced with the opening of the new museum that the occupancy rates are going to just explode,” Wilson said.
Business, Pages 21 on 12/06/2011