Splashy Orange Beach resort hotel plans unveiled
Friday, July 10, 2009
By RYAN DEZEMBER
Staff Reporter
ORANGE BEACH - K.C. Chiang, a Mobile businessman, this week unveiled detailed plans for a four-star, Gulf-front hotel and convention center that would boast nearly 500 hotel rooms, a 20-lane bowling alley, convention seating for 1,200 and a theater that can double as a wedding chapel.
"The type of clientele we're bringing in are new blood, new revenue, a new kind of (visitor) we have not had," Chiang told the Orange Beach City Council on Tuesday.
On July 21, Chiang and his partners, Chicago-based Centrum Properties and the Wyndham Hotel chain, are scheduled to meet again with city officials to talk about the economic development incentives they believe will be needed to help finance construction.
City Administrator Ken Grimes said Thursday that in preliminary talks with municipal officials, Chiang and his team have said they want to create a special tax district on their 9.3 acres to allow them to collect special levies from customers and for Orange Beach to agree to share some of the sales and lodgings tax the resort generates.
Orange Beach agreed in 2004 to rebate to developers of The Wharf up to $25 million of the taxes generated at that mixed-use project.
City officials are willing to consider the developers' request, Grimes said, in an effort to help the project win financing from hesitant lenders.
"(Banks) are not getting behind projects like they once did," Grimes said. "They're looking for more public-private partnerships."
Proposed for what was once a cluster of 20 beach houses near the city's western edge, the Wyndham & Winfield Resort Hotel and Convention Center is the latest big vision for the property. In 2005, developers won approval to build a 30-story, 387-unit condo tower called Coral Reef.
That tower never came out of the ground and, like several unrealized condo projects along Baldwin County's beaches, has been redrawn as a hotel.
While high-rise hotels require the same type of multimillion-dollar construction loans to build as condo towers, their success is contingent not on luring hundreds of buyers but on finding companies to manage the hotels.
Chiang's project features two towers, one carrying the Wyndham Hotel flag and the other with his own Winfield Resorts brand.
Drawn up by architect Forrest Daniell, who has designed several high-profile projects in Orange Beach and Perdido Key, Fla. - including the Turquoise Place condominiums - the glassy towers share a curvy, three-story base.
Above two levels of parking are most of the resort's amenities and meeting space.
A pair of ballrooms will be able to be joined to create a single, 12,000-square-foot space big enough to hold more than a thousand people.
Beyond adjacent meeting rooms will be a theater to host dinners, performances or weddings. Two restaurants are planned - one fine dining; the other featuring a more casual atmosphere garnished with orchid gardens - as are a pair of retail outlets: a hotel gift shop and a bridal store.
Pools are proposed both indoors and out, and the designs call for rooftop courts for basketball and tennis. The Wyndham Hotel, rising a level above the 17-story Winfield tower, will be topped with a 6,000-square-foot spa.
But the grandest of all the recreational features is the computerized 20-lane bowling alley Chiang said he hopes he can use to lure professional tournaments to town.
The bowling alley, Chiang said, is a "driving force" behind the project, as much as the conference space. The lanes, he said, "will bring in a totally different breed of folks that are money spenders."
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