Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp. announced on Tuesday that the $197 million hotel being built in South Lake Washington by Renton’s SECO Development and expected to open in 2017 will be flagged with the company’s Regency brand. The Hyatt Regency Lake Washington at Seattle’s Southport is billed as the first four-star hotel and conference center in Renton.
“We believe that the globally recognized Hyatt Regency brand will resonate with the growing base of business and leisure travelers to the City of Renton,” David Tarr, senior vice president of real estate and development for Hyatt, said in a news release, “and we look forward to giving them an outstanding new lodging option in the area.”
The hotel is part of SECO’s $570 million Southport mixed-use development, which would also include luxury apartments, three office towers and retail space on 17.5 acres along the shores of Lake Washington.
“Southport is rare waterfront development positioned to create a new gateway development that will help drive new growth and quality of development of Renton,” Brent Camann, senior property asset manager for SECO, said in an email.
Compared to other places in the region, “Renton is an ideal market to leverage the lower cost of living through lower home prices and taxes,” Camann said. “Renton also is ideally situated with respect to access to other communities and the Seattle international airport, which helps with respect to transportation issues.”
The Southport Hyatt Regency would be the closest four-star hotel to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and bring an estimated 2,310 jobs to the Renton area.
“Hyatt Regency Lake Washington at Seattle’s Southport is a hotel experience being designed to cultivate connections and offer memorable dining experiences, stimulating recreational facilities and inspirational meeting services,” SECO CEO Michael Christ said in the release. “We are delighted to be working with Hyatt and contributing to the economic vitality of the area with this new hotel.”
The 12-story hotel would feature 347 rooms, including 31 suites, approximately 43,000 square feet of meeting and event space, glass art wall structures and direct access to the lake. For outside events, the hotel would have garden-landscaped terraces of up to 12,000 square feet overlooking the lake.
“Once constructed, this Hyatt Regency hotel will serve as a critical catalyst for the emerging South Lake Washington neighborhood,” Renton Mayor Denis Law said in the release. “This new development will have a positive impact on our region’s employment base as well as demand for business services, tourism and convention business.”
For decades, much of Renton’s waterfront and surrounding areas were used by utility agency Puget Sound Energy and aircraft manufacturer Boeing. But the utility’s steam plant there was decommissioned and later demolished to make way for Southport. Then in late 2004, Boeing sold 46 acres of surplus land for the first phase of a new mixed-use urban village called The Landing.
