The Port of Kalama, Washington, has approved a final lease agreement with McMenamins for a new restaurant and hotel to be built in the Columbia River town.

The development will include a 40-room hotel, a restaurant, a rooftop brewpub with river views, a brewery and a second, smaller pub at Ahles Point.

The Port of Kalama is building the facilities to suit McMenamins. Construction is expected to begin within 60 days, port officials said in a news release on Thursday.

Collins Architectural Group of Longview, Washington, is designing the development with Hawaiian motifs. The firm previously designed the port’s administrative building.

McMenamins is designing the interior with Ankrom Moisan Architects. Pacific Crest Construction, based in Troutdale, is engaged on the interior build-out. Pacific Crest has worked on several McMenamins projects.

The Kalama location will be the ninth in Washington for Portland-based McMenamins.

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McMenamins Inc. has signed a lease to operate a new hotel and brewpub at the Port of Kalama. It’s the latest move into Washington by the Portland-based hospitality group.

Space for a 40-room hotel, meeting rooms, a restaurant, a brewery and a gift shop will be built. The rooftop brewpub will have a river view. A smaller 500-square-foot pub will be constructed nearby at Ahles Point.

The project is scheduled for completion by the end of 2017. It will be McMenamins’ ninth Washington location.

The Port of Kalama is building the structures to suit McMenamins. The port will also construct the parking area and landscaping, and rough in electrical and mechanical infrastructure. The hospitality company will be responsible for the interior.

The port’s board of commissioners approved the lease last week.

Collins Architectural Group, of Longview, Washington, will design the new McMenamins development; the historic Pioneer Inn in Lahaina, on Maui, will serve as a model. The firm also designed the port’s administrative building.

The build-to-suit scenario is not unusual for the port, spokeswoman Liz Newman said.

“That’s actually our business model,” she said.

The port has two warehouses under construction for Steelscape LLC, a steel supplier for the construction industry.

McMenamins also has experience with build-to-suit projects, said Renee Rank, the company’s marketing director. McMenamins owns some of its properties, and leases others.

The Kalama development has been in the works for several years. The project was slowed by the recession, Rank said.

It adds up to a major new Kalama amenity that port officials hope will draw visitors.

“I think it will bring people off of I-5,” Newman said. “We have a beautiful downtown and some great parks down by the river, and I think it will raise the profile of both.”

The port has room nearby for smaller projects that would complement the hotel and brewpub, Newman said.

The Port of Kalama is squeezed between Interstate 5 and the Columbia River, with 5 miles of riverfront property. The BNSF and Union Pacific railroads serve the port, which also has ready access to I-5 and Columbia River shipping.

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Just a few weeks after opening its Anderson School complex in Bothell, Wash., McMenamins is turning its attention south – to a former Elks lodge in Tacoma, Wash., that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

McMenamins purchased the building in 2009, company co-founder Brian McMenamin said, and then added the annex in 2012. This week the company announced that it is seeking outside investment to help pay for a renovation that could cost upwards of $25 million. The company’s goal is to start the bulk of redevelopment in spring 2016 and open in summer 2017.

“We’re pumped about it,” McMenamin said. “We’ve been nosing around Tacoma for the better part of 20 or 25 years. The timing is in place and we’re ready to go.”

McMenamins will continue its longstanding tradition of working with Ankrom Moisan Architects, Andersen Construction and Pacific Crest Construction.

The building was constructed in 1915-16. It will be renovated to include approximately 46 hotel rooms with private baths, a ballroom for events, three restaurants, small bars, a McMenamins brewery; an outdoor café and patio along Spanish steps, and gardens that will provide the restaurants with seasonal ingredients.

Some McMenamins projects, such as Edgefield, have been completed in phases. However, the team wants to deliver the Elks lodge as a complete project, which is why it is seeking outside investment. McMenamins formed Elks Temple Properties LLC to raise approximately 30 percent of project costs – as much as $8 million to $10 million. Minimum investments of $150,000 are being sought from accredited investors.

“What’s been nice is that our investors are people that understand McMenamins and the business and are fans of the business,” McMenamins Chief Financial Officer Christopher Longinetti said. “They know what can be from these properties. They understand the importance of a community investment, and the impact it can have on the community.”

With the expansion of the Tacoma Link light rail, the McMenamins property will become another stop between the city’s museum/university district and the Stadium and Hilltop neighborhoods. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland believes that the renovation will benefit both the city and the region.

“This long-anticipated project will transform a beloved historic building into a family-friendly brewpub and hotel with distinctive art, live music and entertainment options,” she said. “A revitalized Elks lodge will be a regional destination.”

McMenamins, founded in 1983 by Brian McMenamin and Mike McMenamin, currently operates 54 pubs, restaurants and historic hotels. All of the establishments are in the Pacific Northwest, but Brian McMenamin said that the company has pondered the idea of expanding outside of Oregon and Washington.

“We’ve talked a lot about that romantically,” he said. “Let’s put a place in Hawaii. Let’s put a place in Florida. We move slowly. Being based here in the Northwest, we’re familiar with the Northwest. Right now everything is within a three-hour drive from Portland. That’s kind of our limit. But Northern California? It would feel great to have something down in the Bay Area. I don’t know. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the works. We’re continuing the movement.”

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McMenamins, a Northwest chain of brewpubs and hotels, is set to open a Seattle-area foothold, its largest in Washington state.

Anderson School will open Oct. 15 and include a 72-room hotel, a restaurant, a swimming pool, a small bar, a brewery and a movie theater.

Initial design work on the 76-year-old former junior high school began in 2012, with serious construction starting in 2014. Outside the three-story art-deco building are courtyards with fire pits, space for live music, gardens and a community space. The property is 5.41 acres and located three blocks north of the intersection of Route 527 and Route 522, 13 miles north of Seattle.

McMenamins has 54 locations, including 47 in Oregon. In Washington, the company has a hotel in Centralia, and several smaller pubs. It’s currently looking at developing a piece of property in Tacoma, according to marketing director Renee Rank Ignacio, and will soon add rooms to its hotel at the Old St. Francis School in Bend, and a hotel to its Cornelius Pass Roadhouse pub in Hillsboro.

“We’ve got a lot going on,” she said.

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Ankrom Moisan Architects associate Blaine Burris knows that designing a McMenamins hotel often involves stepping back and letting a team of artists help transform old buildings so that they can accommodate new uses.

“As far as atmosphere goes, they pretty much go the full nine yards,” Burris said. “A lot of what we do … it’s like assembling an armature and creating opportunities for the artists to fill in spaces.”

A $23 million project to turn an 83-year-old ex-middle school in Bothell, Wash., into a 72-room hotel with a brewery, a restaurant, bars, event spaces, a movie theater and a pool, was no exception for Ankrom Moisan staffers who have designed dozens of locations for Portland-based McMenamins Inc. The challenge was finding a way to reuse the five existing Anderson School buildings while staying to true their original intent, history and connection to the surrounding community, said Mario Espinosa, an Ankrom Moisan senior associate.

“The idea is all about the locale,” Espinosa said. “If it’s a school, there are things that make it significant. You’re not restoring. You’re repurposing it.”

Crews from general contractors Andersen Construction and Pacific Crest Construction recently started construction on the 5.4-acre Anderson School site along Bothell Way Northeast, slightly north of Washington State Route 522. To close a funding gap for the project, McMenamins co-founders and brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin raised $8 million via crowdfunding.

Plans call for converting the W.A. Anderson Building – a three-story, 55,000-square-foot former middle school built in the 1930s – into a hotel. The 30,000-square-foot former gym will become a conference center, an event space and a movie theater; a 33,000-square-foot building that once housed shop classes will become a brewery; and the 28,000-square-foot ex-cafeteria will become a restaurant and lobby.

The project also involves transformation of a 26,000-square-foot former community pool building into an indoor tropical oasis, complete with a heated soaking pool, real palm trees and a mezzanine-level bar in place of bleachers.

“We’re going to shallow it a bit so it’s not an exercise pool, (but) just a lounging pool,” Espinosa said. “The idea is to take that Olympic look of the pool and turn it more into an environment.”

The design team toyed with the idea of removing the roof to create an open-air pool, but eventually decided to leave it, Burris said. Instead, the renovation will give the building a more open feel via additional wall openings and skylights. Bamboo accents and tropical plants will enhance the island-themed atmosphere, he said.

“We’re working to soften … this to break down this monolithic look to it,” he said. “The idea is to have that feel of authenticity.”

The five existing buildings will surround a central courtyard with a covered walkway around the perimeter and the only new construction – a 360-square-foot “shed” bar.

Most of the existing buildings were constructed in the 1960s and ’70s and have a strictly utilitarian look, Burris said. This makes the ornate exterior – including a brick facade and large windows – of the 1930s Anderson Building stand out, he said.

“The outside was the jewel,” he said. “We’re preserving it.”

Although the Anderson Building will retain its original facade, the interior was gutted in a previous renovation into office space. To convert the building into a hotel, crews will remove drop ceilings to restore the original 12-foot height in the rooms, and use other touches to remind visitors that it was once a school. The large former classroom windows will remain untouched.

“It looked like a modern office building,” Mike McMenamin said. “We’ll bring it back to what it looked like.”

The idea is to acknowledge the building’s history, which will be enhanced via historic photographs, paintings and murals on the walls throughout the complex telling the story of the former middle school from local residents’ perspectives, he said. McMenamins staffers are in the process of researching the former school’s history, and 16 artists from the Bothell area have been hired to help create 300 to 400 pieces of artwork.

“We’re going to tie it in from an artistic standpoint; that’s the beauty of it,” Mike McMenamin said. “There are thousands and thousands of people that went (to Anderson School). It’s great.”

This community involvement is what keeps design for McMenamins interesting, Espinosa said.

“It’s incredibly engaging with the community,” he said. “To me, that is the whole purpose of McMenamins. (Each place) has its own feel to it because they are all about that, all about the community.”

The Anderson School McMenamins is scheduled to open in December 2015.

McMenamins Anderson School

Location: Bothell, Wash.

Cost: $23 million

Construction start date: November 2014

Anticipated construction completion date: December 2015

Owner: Anderson School Properties LLC

Developer: McMenamins

Architect: Ankrom Moisan Architects

Engineer: Froelich Engineers

General contractors: Andersen Construction and Pacific Crest Construction

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Another McMenamins project is under way in Portland.

This time, it’s a new addition to the Kennedy School, a historic elementary school in Northeast Portland that was converted into a hotel.

The free-standing addition will be two-stories tall and hold 22 guest rooms. Each room will be themed after a famous literary author; McMenamins officials would not reveal details on which authors would be used.

The addition is in reaction to low vacancy rates and high demand, said Renee Rank, public relations officer for the company. The hotel will add four new positions to its staff to accommodate the increase in capacity.

The project is expected to be completed by mid December this year.

Built in 1915, the school was closed down in 1980 following years of declining enrollment. It was obtained and restored by McMenamins in 1997.

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is looking into the possibility of turning an old, burned-out Masonic lodge in North Portland into a boutique hotel.

Mount Hood Masonic Lodge No. 157 is at 5308 N. Commercial Ave., adjacent to . The company envisions joining the two properties by converting the paved parking lot between them into a lush garden with an outdoor spa, a garden bar and a sitting area.

Mario Espinosa, an architect with , said the concept is subject to design review and public input. A pre-application conference is scheduled for April 11.

The 16,245-square-foot building was constructed in 1923 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was designed by Sutton and Whitney, a once notable Oregon architecture firm, and stands out in the neighborhood with a Colonial Revival-style brick facade. And like other McMenamins properties, its history has flair.

Tim Hills, McMenamins historian, said that in 1924 a local group staged a drama production at the building.

“Two of the actors in there went on to quite brighter careers after 1924: Clark Gable and the other was Mark Rothko, the artist,” Hills said.

The production was an adaptation of author Zona Gale’s 1920 novel “Miss Lulu Bett,” and the director was an actress named Josephine Dillon, Hills said.

“Later in 1924, she and Billy Gable – as he was known at the time – went down to Hollywood and got married, and he started going by his middle name and away they went,” he said.

Hills said another interesting historical tidbit is that one of the lodge’s founders, John Chambers, was the original owner of the funeral home (now the Chapel Pub) next door.

In 1981, vandals set fire to the lodge, and flames wreaked havoc throughout the interior. It has since sat vacant.

“But you can see the remnants of the grandeur that was there and these big, enormous spaces that were used for ceremonies and meetings,” Hills said.

In 2007, McMenamins purchased the property from Ethos Inc., a music education foundation, for $675,000. Prior to the recent recession, Ethos had hoped to make the temple its headquarters and turn the space into a teaching and performance venue.

Espinosa said the team wants to restore the building’s natural grandeur.

“The exterior is (planned) to be renovated and it’s pretty much going to keep its old beauty and clean it up and make it a little stronger,” Espinosa said.

Much of the charred remains would need to be removed, and the building would need a seismic upgrade, but McMenamins envisions a three-story, 46-room hotel. It would have a 974-square-foot venue, meeting and bar/pub space, as well as another small pub in the attic. The company would convert the basement into mechanical space and add showers and restrooms for guests using the spa.

Espinosa said the proposed hotel would essentially follow in the footsteps of the 51-room Crystal Hotel, a downtown Portland property that the company renovated last year. That hotel’s rooms highlight past performances in the building, and while Espinosa said the new hotel would also play up history, he did not know yet what that would look like.

Espinosa said he hopes the proposed plans will be well received and that he thinks it’s a sound way to preserve an ailing architectural landmark.

“We’re trying to save the building and not let it cave in on itself,” he said.

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The newest historic renovation for the McMenamins chain was available for a sneak peek party today. Patrons could walk the halls of the Crystal Hotel, taste wine and talk with the people who helped with the project.

The Crystal Hotel, 100-year-old building in Portland’s West End, has been under a renovation for more than a year. It’s almost finished – a few spots on the walls and some unassembled urinals remain – but the building feels like a McMenamins. It has bold colors, whimsical touches and clues to its rich past. Read more about the history and renovation of the Crystal Hotel.

The project is sustainable in that it is a historic preservation, but the renovation also included other green features. The wood used was made from recycled lumber, and the HVAC and cooking equipment was designed to be energy efficient and certified by Energy Trust of Oregon, according Joe Vondrak, president of Pacific Crest Construction, the general contractor. A below-ground soaking pool is filled with salt water, which is better for the environment than are chemicals. McMenamins also plans to add a garden to the building’s roof.

The building has five floors with 51 rooms. Most of those rooms are small and do not have bathrooms, only sinks – “European queen rooms,” they’re called. But each room is themed to a song that once played at the Crystal Ballroom, next door. The rooms are painted with borders of song lyrics, and paintings of musicians hang on the walls. Every bed also has an elaborately painted headboard.

The hotel has a cafe on the ground floor – Zeus Cafe, named for nightclub owners Nate and Tilly Zusman, who worked the seedy Desert Room in the 1950s and ’60s. Below, in the basement, is the soaking pool and a dark lounge area called Al’s Den. The lounge is named after Al Winter, a notorious gambling kingpin who frequented the hotel in the ’40s.

The halls and stairways of the hotel are lined with pictures of the property’s past – from its founding days in the 1800s to its time in the Gay Triangle during the ’70s and ’80s.

The hotel doesn’t officially open until May 3, but it’s worth a look. Rooms run $85 to $165 a night.

The post McMenamins Crystal Hotel offers sneak peek appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The newest historic renovation for the McMenamins chain was available for a sneak peek party today. Patrons could walk the halls of the Crystal Hotel, taste wine and talk with the people who helped with the project.

The Crystal Hotel, 100-year-old building in Portland’s West End, has been under a renovation for more than a year. It’s almost finished – a few spots on the walls and some unassembled urinals remain – but the building feels like a McMenamins. It has bold colors, whimsical touches and clues to its rich past. Read more about the history and renovation of the Crystal Hotel.

The project is sustainable in that it is a historic preservation, but the renovation also included other green features. The wood used was made from recycled lumber, and the HVAC and cooking equipment was designed to be energy efficient and certified by Energy Trust of Oregon, according Joe Vondrak, president of Pacific Crest Construction, the general contractor. A below-ground soaking pool is filled with salt water, which is better for the environment than are chemicals. McMenamins also plans to add a garden to the building’s roof.

The building has five floors with 51 rooms. Most of those rooms are small and do not have bathrooms, only sinks – “European queen rooms,” they’re called. But each room is themed to a song that once played at the Crystal Ballroom, next door. The rooms are painted with borders of song lyrics, and paintings of musicians hang on the walls. Every bed also has an elaborately painted headboard.

The hotel has a cafe on the ground floor – Zeus Cafe, named for nightclub owners Nate and Tilly Zusman, who worked the seedy Desert Room in the 1950s and ’60s. Below, in the basement, is the soaking pool and a dark lounge area called Al’s Den. The lounge is named after Al Winter, a notorious gambling kingpin who frequented the hotel in the ’40s.

The halls and stairways of the hotel are lined with pictures of the property’s past – from its founding days in the 1800s to its time in the Gay Triangle during the ’70s and ’80s.

The hotel doesn’t officially open until May 3, but it’s worth a look. Rooms run $85 to $165 a night.

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It has been an automotive parts store, a bathhouse and a nighttime hotspot. But the Crystal Hotel certainly has not been boring.

A renovation, under way for the past year, is transforming the historic, triangular building into a 51-room rock-and-roll hotel for to complement its Crystal Ballroom concert hall nearby.

The Crystal Hotel, which straddles Burnside Street between the Pearl District and downtown’s emerging West End, has a long history, according to Tim Hills, a historian for McMenamins.

The story starts in the 1850s, when two of Portland’s earliest residents, Hiram and Hannah Smith, lived on the block at Southwest 12th Avenue and Burnside Street that now houses the new hotel. The Smiths leveled the trees there, sold the lumber and began subdividing the land for housing. They also created a poor farm that would later become in Troutdale, Hills said. A core group of McMenamins artists will paint panels to tell this pre-history within the new hotel.

The building itself opened in 1911 as a residential hotel; the ground floor, however, had a different use.

“From 1911 until World War II there was an auto-related business in that ground floor,” Hills said. “Up and down the Burnside corridor were dealerships, tire stores and garages. Powell’s was an auto dealership and the first floor of Ringlers (the Crystal Ballroom) was a service garage.”

Right before World War II, the owners of the ground-floor auto shop called in an architect to figure out how to carve a hole into the building’s first story for a drive-through. That architect was the late Pietro Belluschi, who may have chosen to forget the early commission, Hills said.

“It was not his proudest moment,” he said. “During that period, a lot of noted architects were just trying to get business somewhere and taking jobs they normally wouldn’t have. I don’t know how much it cost, but it was a pretty sizable amount. A few months later, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the business was liquidated so the owners, who were pilots, could help the war effort.”

The drive-through was sealed up years ago; however, builders spent a substantial amount of time shoring up the seismic stability of the historic structure, according to Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects’ Mario Espinosa, who designed the renovation. The hotel has a new stair shaft on the Burnside Street side and reinforced concrete foundations.

Music, gambling and prostitution became common in the building in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was known as the Desert Room. Musicians playing around town oftentimes would play a gig and then head to the Desert Room to catch bandleader Charlie Gabriel’s last set of the night, Hills said.

“The Desert Room was this high-class place,” Hills said. “People dressed nice. The folks I talked to didn’t want to go into detail about what activities may or may not have been going on, but the slogan was, ‘You can get whatever you want at the Desert Room.’ And you really could get whatever you wanted.”

The Crystal Hotel’s rooms will celebrate some of its past performers, including musicians Wilson Pickett and Marvin Gaye, actor Rudolph Valentino and author Allen Ginsberg. Modern-day Portland musicians like Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney also will be represented, Hills said.

The hotel rooms will look much as they did when the place opened in 1911, but acoustic glazing on the original windows and acoustic treatment of the historic plaster walls will limit noise pollution, Espinosa said.

“The hotel’s original tenants would recognize the place,” he said. “The auto noise from Burnside is significant. But with the laminated glass, you close the window and the change is pretty radical.”

Another shout-out to the building’s wild past is a curvaceous soaking pool in the basement, along with a pub, a spa and a hidden passageway to Ringlers Annex, the bar next door. From the late ’70s up until 2007, the upstairs of the building was a men’s bathhouse. Later, gay nightclubs such as Flossie’s and Silverado occupied ground-floor space. Historic photos of Portland’s first and subsequent gay pride parades will be featured in the hotel.

“Twelfth and Stark evolved into this vibrant, gay community,” Hills said. “In the ’70s, gays were coming out into the city and feeling comfortable for the first time. I’ve talked to people who said this building was their home away from home. It wasn’t by accident that the gay pride parade went right by the building.”

Pacific Crest Construction is wrapping up its work. The Crystal Hotel is anticipated to open in May, and will begin accepting reservations in February. It sits between the north side of Burnside Street, where chic condos are replacing warehouses, and the south side, where revitalization is overcoming many years of urban blight.

“Burnside has always been a division until this point,” Hills said. “Today there is a continuum between these two parts, with this property right in the middle.”

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