New upscale West Elm Hotel coming to Midtown Detroit

Detroit will soon gain another new upscale hotel.

Furniture and home décor retailer West Elm plans to build a 130-plus room hotel at Woodward and Eliot Street in Midtown, next to the Bonstelle Theatre, on a lot that is now a parking lot.

The project's developer, the Detroit-based Roxbury Group, announced the hotel plans Tuesday morning. Groundbreaking is expected later this year, with an opening date sometime in 2020.

The West Elm Hotel is the latest in a series of new and soon-to-open Detroit hotels, most of them around 130 rooms or smaller.

Others include newly opened, 106-room the Siren Hotel, 1509 Broadway; the 130-room Shinola Hotel, set to open this fall at 1400 Woodward, and the 110-room extended-stay Element Hotel by Westin, also slated for the fall.

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Hospitality industry consultant Chuck Skelton said demand for hotel rooms in Detroit is such that there will likely be enough business to support this flurry of modest-sized hotels. The hotel occupancy rate in Detroit is about 68%, which is considered healthy, he said.

"With the historical growth that we've shown in demand over the last two or three years, I think these hotels, 100 (rooms) at a time, are going to be a blip on the radar," Skelton said. "What wouldn't be a blip is if someone comes in and says 'OK, we need to build 500 rooms there, and 400 rooms there.' "

Architectural designs for the West Elm Hotel, including the number of floors, are still being finalized, said David Di Rita, principal of the Roxbury Group. He said he anticipates that West Elm will attract guests such as those who now stay at the boutique Aloft Hotel in downtown.

Aloft guests can pay roughly $200 up to $400 per night, depending on the season and day of the week, according to the hotel's booking website.

Detroit is one of six U.S. locations where West Elm is launching its new hotel brand.

"We are excited to work with West Elm Hotels to catalyze this project and bring it to fruition in Detroit," Di Rita said. "This is a group that saw what was going on in Detroit and they said, ‘we want to be here.’"

The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based retailer first announced plans for a Detroit hotel in 2016, but changed its initial idea to build the hotel at Cass and Canfield on the Wayne State University campus. It was not immediately clear Tuesday why the hotel's site was relocated.

The Roxbury Group is in discussions with Wayne State to potentially include the Bonstelle Theatre in the West Elm Hotel plan. The university is preparing to relocate its theater program to another building.

"It's been a bit of a forgotten jewel in Detroit, so we hope that can come to pass," Di Rita said of the Bonstelle.

The hotel also would be a neighbor to a proposed mixed-use commercial and residential project that is being developed by Birmingham-based Professional Property Management.

Adam Nyman, an official with Professional Property Management, said there are no available plans or details yet regarding that potential project, which is dubbed SOMA for South of Mack Avenue.

"The plan for the site is still being formulated to some degree and tweaked," Nyman said.

Other newly opened or planned Detroit hotels