The Hotel Granada, at 1302 W. Peachtree St., has completed its extensive renovation and is back open for business. The midtown hotel, with 120 rooms, will not be tagged with a brand, instead choosing to be independent.

Aparium Hotel Group headed up the two-year project, remaking the Spanish-colonial, 101-year-old landmark that was previously the Artmore Hotel. Scarp Ridge Capital Partners and Monomoy Property Ventures led the Hotel Granada renovation. Ken Gowland of architecture firm MetroStudio led design and preservation work.  The Hodges Ward Elliot real estate advisory firm arranged the hotel’s $21.1-million sale in 2022.

The building originally opened in 1924 as the Granada Apartments and was converted to hotel uses in 1984. Prior to closing, the Artmore was Midtown’s only independent boutique hotel, stylized with a Spanish-Mediterranean red tile roof, stucco façade, and open courtyard that have all been retained. 

The hotel will house an all-day bar and restaurant. Regular hotel rates start at $169 per night this month.

A new boutique hotel has taken up in Athens where the Southern Manufacturing Company made denim in 1902.

The 50-room Rivet House is part of the historic Southern Mill development, a four-building, 160,000-square-foot property. Jessica Whitley designed the hotel, leaving the exposed brick and wood beams from the more than 100-year-old former factory. Whatley and her husband, James, bought the property for $1.4 million. Indigo Road Hospitality Group will manage the property.

Rivet House includes a spa and a restaurant called Osteria Olio, which serves modern Italian cuisine.

Room rates will start at $340 per night. Guest room options include standard king, standard queen, premier king and king suites.

The hotel is near the University of Georgia campus in Athens, and it hopes to capitalize on the many arts and athletic events at the school. The hotel is not flagged by a brand, choosing to remain independent.

The fourth Drift Hotel has opened, the latest, in Nashville. TMC Hospitality opened the first Drift hotel in San Jose del Cabo in 2021, followed by Santa Barbara and Palm Springs.

The 87-key hotel has spacious multi-room suites, a ground-level pool with neighboring cabanas and three food and beverage concepts. TMC, in collaboration with Dryden, a Nashville-based firm, has totally revamped the former Stadium Inn. The brand said it chose Nashville — a popular market for activity within the burgeoning lifestyle hotel segment — for its first expansion outside of the West Coast. 

Guests can opt for a king bedroom or a one-, two- or three-bedroom suite with a patio option. Suites feature kitchenettes, desks and spaces for both dining and lounging. 

There is also a 1,800-square-foot penthouse on the seventh floor that plays homage to a former famous guest at the inn: Elvis Presley. 

New City will soon open Forth, a 196-room hotel and social club along Atlanta’s Eastside Trail. The $150 million tower will open this June. Forth becomes the first hotel with direct access to the BeltLine.

Morris Adjmi Architects designed Forth. Method Co. will operate Forth.

The 16-story Forth includes 39 furnished apartments for extended stays.  FORTH Atlanta’s food and beverage offerings will include a lobby café and bar, a rooftop cocktail lounge, an Italian steakhouse, and a poolside restaurant and bar. Additional amenities include an event venue, a 350-seat coworking space, a members-only social club, and a 2,300-square-foot outdoor pool.

The private club, called The Forth Club, spans several floors. It includes a fitness center, pilates and yoga studios, outdoor pool, restaurants and a lounge. Membership rates have not yet been released.

In 2016, New City tore down an aging Kroger store and built office building 725 Ponce.

A $30 million boutique hotel is on the way in Roswell, north of Atlanta. The five-story, Hyatt-branded Cambray Hotel will have 125 rooms. It will start construction in May. Its architecture is modeled after the brick mills that were prominent in the area in the town’s past.

The hotel will feature a rooftop eatery, a 24-hour market and valet services. Swinerton will handle the construction of the project. The developer is a joint venture of DSM Real Estate Partners and GarageCap. 

Next door is Southern Post, a 4.3-acre mixed-use development with around 90,000 square feet of office space, apartments, townhomes and retail space.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the project comes as hotel occupancy dips a bit across metro Atlanta, according to new data from the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau. In January, occupancy was just under 58% in the 29-county Atlanta MSA, down 3.7% from a year earlier.

A CRE veteran who helped usher in popular adaptive reuse projects in Atlanta has teamed up to form a boutique brokerage firm with another seasoned real estate pro who led Stream Realty Partners’ retail group. 

Courtesy of Bridger Properties

Bridger Properties co-founders Jack Arnold and Merritt Lancaster

Merritt Lancaster and Jack Arnold have started Bridger Properties, a full-service brokerage firm that already is managing 500K SF and leasing 2M SF across Metro Atlanta, including the ground-floor retail spaces at Spectrum on Spring apartments and the retail leasing for the mixed-use Westside Paper project, which is currently under construction.

Lancaster and Arnold established the firm in late 2020 but officially announced its formation this month.

Lancaster — whose last firm, Confluence Real Estate, was folded into Bridger — said the timing of starting up a new brokerage house in Atlanta is partly due to real estate cycles: The coronavirus pandemic may be providing an opportunity to gear up as Metro Atlanta enters a recovery that will look hugely different from the last one.

“Even though it’s a very odd real estate cycle and it doesn’t jive with the other ones, it feels like the beginning of maybe a new cycle,” Lancaster said.

Since forming, Bridger has hired a handful of other CRE professionals, including property management Vice President Chris Hicks, previously a property manager for Stream Realty and Lincoln Property Co.; Laura King, who previously headed up leasing at Paces Properties; and Shelbi Bodner, who also worked at Paces Properties and assisted in leasing Krog Street Market’s food hall.

Arnold was previously the managing director of retail for Stream Realty in Atlanta, and he acknowledged that the firm at the moment is retail-heavy in its experience. But Arnold said Bridger is scouting the brokerage world for new hires to expand its expertise into other product types, including office.

“We plan to include having all the food groups as we go,” he said.

Arnold and Lancaster said Bridger is focusing on urban mixed-use and suburban properties throughout the metro area. Its initial leasing and management portfolio includes grocery-anchored and neighborhood shopping centers in Peachtree City, Acworth, Kennesaw, Smyrna and Sandy Springs, as well as retail at the Alexan Eight West apartments near Georgia Tech.

Bridger’s co-founders also have experience with adaptive reuse projects. At Stream Realty, Arnold drove the firm’s retail and mixed-use investment activity, spearheading the acquisition of 2.1M SF of retail, office and industrial spaces in the Southeast.

In the seven years he was a principal at Paces Properties, Lancaster and Paces CEO David Cochran developed a number of Atlanta’s most notable adaptive reuse projects, including Krog Street Market, Atlanta Dairies and Optimist Hall, a food hall in Charlotte that was converted from a historic textile mill.

Lancaster said Bridger also has opportunities to penetrate into the adaptive reuse and mixed-use sectors, which have been gaining more interest among institutional investors in recent years. Institutional owners have been tapping local experts with a track record in those properties to lease up empty spaces, Lancaster said. 

Transcend CEO Patrick Braswell, who co-founded his boutique brokerage firm in Atlanta in 2015, agreed that more institutional investors are looking to work with local experts, rather than relying solely on large, multinational firms.

“To understand where to find [deals] … and what tenants would be great for it, you have to have local knowledge,” Braswell said. “And sometimes the local boutiques have more local knowledge.”

Arnold said owners are seeking more nimble, less bureaucratic firms to lease their properties, and he and his co-founder think Bridger’s mix of services will hit the sweet spot for the increasingly large funds chasing real estate deals. 

“As capital consolidates and gets larger, they will continue to need local expertise on both the service and investment side,” Lancaster said. “We have the resources on both the landlord and tenant sides within the market. … That’s hard to get if you’re in New York. If you’re not touching it, it’s hard to get that local information.”