Barber Group Plans 22-story Luxury Hotel

Brandon Barber plans to build a 22-story, $100 million Westin hotel in Rogers.

If approved by the Rogers Planning Commission, the Westin will be the tallest building between Tulsa and Little Rock.

Barber hopes to begin construction early next year and have the hotel completed by early 2009.

Across 45th Street from the proposed hotel, Barber has plans for a $200 million retail and office development, currently dubbed “Forty-fifth.” At least a couple of high-rise buildings will go up there. Barber’s proposed development is just up the road from the much-ballyhooed Pinnacle Promenade.

The chairman and CEO of The Barber Group Inc. of Springdale doesn’t just have a vision for Northwest Arkansas. Barber’s thinking bigger than that.

Way bigger.

The 30-year-old developer said his 2.5-year-old company is “aggressively transitioning from residential to commercial and hospitality” projects and he wants those projects to be The Barber Group’s legacy.

“I don’t consider myself a hotelier yet … I haven’t built anything!” Barber wrote in an e-mail.

But it seems that if the groundwork hasn’t been laid yet, “hotelier” is at least in the dirt work stage.

The Barber Group has hotel/condo projects planned in Fayetteville, Rogers and Nashville, Tenn. Barber said he’s also considering other markets. Potential cities mentioned were Little Rock and Birmingham, Ala.

And if that’s not enough, those don’t include two other large mixed-use projects already under way in Fayetteville: the seven-story Legacy Building near Dickson Street and the $300 million Bellafont development on Joyce Boulevard.

Barber is very clear about the group’s mission to cater first-class luxury to affluent clientele. The top-tier market is the group’s niche, he said. And The Barber Group can fill it and sustain it because no one else is right now.

Barber, a Jonesboro native, wouldn’t say how many investors are lined up to foot the bill on the Westin, or any of his other projects. But he did say The Barber Group will have “significant investors” and that the financing is “lined up.”

A brand like Westin makes it easier, he said.

Rogers Westin

Architectural plans weren’t finalized as of press time, but Barber expects the Westin at 45th Street in Rogers will hold 325 hotel rooms and 30 to 50 luxury condominiums.

There will be 22 stories, Barber said, possibly more. The plans are for 700,000-SF of space and includes spots for two restaurants, a spa, about 20,000 SF of retail space and about 14,000 SF of meeting space.

The Barber Group had preliminary meetings about the project on July 26 with city planners, a representative from the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce and Rogers Mayor Steve Womack.

The Forty-fifth development will be at the corner of New Hope Road (at the north end of the overall retail development) and 45th Street (the main road to the Pinnacle Promenade). Barber calls it the “hard corner of Northwest Arkansas.”

“I can’t imagine a more happenin’ place,” he said.

Amenities for the Westin will be first-class, and residents can expect privacy, he said. Pricing is still up in the air, but condos probably will top out at $350 to $400 per SF, he said. That puts a modest 1,500 SF unit between $525,000 and $600,000.

By comparison, most new, high-end houses in Benton County are going for about $125 per SF. A buyer could purchase a 3,000-SF house for about $375,000.

But condos coupled with hotels are the craze on both coasts, Barber said. There’s a market for people who want to tap into the housekeeping and room service offered in a top-shelf hotel, he said.

All of Barber’s planned hotel/condo combos will be managed by Sage Hospitality Resources, a Denver company that manages 50 hotels in 23 states. The company has also developed or co-developed more than $1 billion in properties in the last eight years.

Brad Robinette, senior vice president with Sage, said the hotel/condo concept is fairly new but there is definitely a market for it and there are obvious efficiencies when the two are tied together.

A star rating on all three hotels should be four to four-and-a-half depending on which service does the rating, Robinette said.

More than just hospitality management, with Sage The Barber Group also gets the expertise on building successful hotels, Robinette said.

Bill Bunce is a director of development for the western division for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. Starwood is the parent company for the Westin, Sheridan and W brands, and owns or franchises more than 149,000 hotel rooms in North America.

Bunce couldn’t comment on a deal with The Barber Group because his corporation won’t allow him to comment on any agreement until ink is dried on a contract. Technically, he can’t confirm or deny a contract, he said.

As of press time, that ink hadn’t dried. But through various sources the Business Journal learned that an agreement was in fact making the rounds.

Plans for the Rogers Westin explain why The Barber Group purchased 56 acres of land across 45th Street at the end of June. Barber paid $27 million for part of the 115-acre Creekside site that will be a place for retail and restaurants with planned Class A office space in two 10-to-12-story office buildings. That property will have about 750,000 SF of build out space, Barber said.

He has letters of intent with potential tenants on file, but he wouldn’t share any names.

Barber admits he’s playing off the work already done by the Pinnacle Group of Rogers, the developers of the Promenade up the road and Pinnacle Hills across Interstate 540. He said he feels lucky to be in the area and to able to follow what they’ve developed.

When asked if 22 stories for the Westin is too big, Mayor Womack said, “no.” In Womack’s opinion, most everything built in Northwest Arkansas in the last 25 years has been “undersized.”

“Look at the Embassy Suites,” he said.

The Embassy Suites across I-540 from the proposed Westin opened in 2003 and is already adding 152 rooms.

“We’re very proud of the development taking place [in Rogers],” Womack said.

Go Westin, Young Man

Barber is a frontiersman, of sorts. But he’s not headed west as Horace Greeley, one-time editor of the New York Tribune, may have suggested in one of his famous editorials from the late 1800s.

Instead, Barber sees gold-gilded hotel keys in the South.

Listening to Barber talk about his plans to develop a string of hotels through yet-to-be re-explored markets in the Southeast, one can almost smell magnolia blossoms and taste sweet tea spiked with mint. He wants to “yes sir and yes ma’am” patrons silly and bring his group’s eclectic, super modern design style to them.

Think Beale Street meets Madison Avenue. Then crank it up several notches.

“We’re creating a market,” he said. “It’s important we out-service our competitors.”

Also, he wants the eventual string of Barber hotels and condos to be as entertaining as they are functional. He wants people to drop their luggage off and feel like they’ve got to go see what’s happening, not retire to a room and flip through cable TV.

Barber plans to keep the hotels fresh by using different architects for different properties. The Westin in Rogers is being designed by Hnedak Bobo Group Inc. of Memphis, and the Westin in Nashville is being designed by J.G. Johnson Architects of Denver. Fayetteville’s Divinity project is being designed by HKS Architects of Dallas.

All told, The Barber Group has about $790 million in projects under development.

Barber is somewhat concerned about the reaction of Fayetteville’s leaders to his group’s announcement of a high-rise hotel in Benton County.

But the research and the retail show that the project will fly there, he said.

“In Rogers, they’re hungry for a luxury hotel,” he said.

Both Barber and Womack think the hotel will have to attract more weekend traffic, not just Monday through Thursday business travelers.

The Divinity project in Fayetteville is “one of the riskiest deals we’ll do,” he said, because it will be a boutique with no name brand attached.

But, he claims, the group’s research showed what each market would bear, so that’s what he’s going to develop.

The ‘villes

The Barber Group’s planned Westin hotel and condos in Nashville is shaping up to be a repeat of the approval process for the Divinity hotel and condo project in Fayetteville.

The group recently finished a six-month campaign for the Divinity project on Fayetteville’s Dickson Street, the city’s entertainment district.

The battle whittled a proposed 15-story building down to nine. The Barber Group postponed plans on the Rogers Westin to deal with the Divinity project.

The Nashville Westin has been proposed as a 19- or 20-story building. The tallest structures in that area along Broadway are six to eight stories.

Rick Bernhardt, executive director of Nashville’s metropolitan planning department, described the area as Nashville’s version of Dickson Street.

“They are in an area of town that is probably our most historically sensitive,” Bernhardt said. “It’s a pretty-well-designed building, but too tall in my opinion.

“They knew the rules when they came in. They are simply trying to go around them.”

But Phil Ryan, executive director of Nashville’s metropolitan development and housing agency, sees the Westin a little differently.

“It’s got a lot of good things going for it — especially the mixed use,” Ryan said. “That’s what cities are about.”

In a July 17 questionnaire about the project posed to business leaders by the Nashville Civic Design Center, 62 percent of respondents said they thought the building was too tall. Fifty-two percent thought it would have a negative impact on Broadway.

The group will resubmit plans in mid-August that “step back” the building from the street.

Back home, the group’s second official commercial building, the Legacy in downtown Fayetteville, is still under construction.

Opening of the Legacy building’s 37 condos will be phased in a few at a time, Barber said, but some of the first floor retail space is scheduled to open in early October, in time for the University of Arkansas Razorback game against Southeast Missouri State.