Ground-up hotel construction: from dirt to the first guest

The first night a hotel sells a room, somebody from our company is in the lobby watching the front desk check people in. That is the finish line we build toward from the first day the excavator shows up, and every phase in between is sequenced backward from it.

Before the dirt moves

A branded hotel starts with two approvals, the city's and the brand's, and they run on different clocks. The brand reviews the design against its prototype: room mix, corridor widths, the breakfast area, the fitness room, the finish standard down to the carpet pattern. The city reviews for code, drainage and fire access. We run both at once in preconstruction, with the architect and the owner, because a design that clears one and not the other goes back to the start. This is also when the long-lead list gets written: elevators, switchgear, rooftop units, the FF&E package, the signage. Some of it takes longer than the structure, so the purchase orders go out before the slab is poured.

Structure and the repeating room

Once site work, utilities and foundations are in, a hotel becomes a lesson in repetition. The same guest room, with the same bathroom wall, the same tub, the same fan coil, the same electrical box locations, gets built dozens or hundreds of times. Our framing, drywall, tile and paint crews build a model room early, with the owner and the brand walking it, and every decision made in that room saves a decision on every floor above it. Public areas are the exception: the lobby, the kitchen, the pool, the meeting rooms each carry their own structure, their own mechanical loads and their own finish drawings, and they get their own attention.

Finishes, FF&E and the floor-by-floor turnover

Finish work in a hotel runs by floor, top down or bottom up, so that FF&E can follow behind it. Our FF&E crews receive the shipments, stage them, and install room by room as each floor is released: casegoods, beds, drapery, artwork, lamps, mirrors, televisions, and the lobby and breakfast furniture. Doing that with our own people means the punch list on a floor gets written by the same crew that installed it, and it gets closed before the next floor opens. Because a principal of the company is on the site through this stretch, the floor-release schedule is a daily conversation, not a weekly report.

The last thirty days

The end of a hotel job is a convergence. Fire marshal and building final. Elevator inspection. Kitchen health inspection. The brand's quality walk. The operator's staff moving in to train, stock linen, load the property management system and run test stays. Each of those needs the building in a specific condition on a specific day, and each one waits on the one before it. We build that last month as its own schedule, with the owner and the general manager in the room, so that the soft opening lands on the date and the grand opening follows it.

What the owner should expect from us

A ground-up hotel is a long job. The value we bring is not any single trade. It is holding the brand, the city, the FF&E deliveries and the operator's needs on one calendar, and having the owner of our company present to make decisions on the ground when the calendar is threatened. Licensed and insured, our principals bring over 20 years of combined experience, and our in-house crews cover the trades that set the pace on a hotel: framing, drywall, tile, stone, millwork, paint and the FF&E install itself.

If you have a site and a brand, send us the prototype set and the site plan and we will map the path from grading to the first check-in, with the owner of our company on the site for all of it.