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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Hood River’s Double Mountain Brewery is renovating a nearly 13,000-square-foot building on Southeast Woodstock Boulevard to accommodate a new tap house and restaurant.

The brewery secured a 10-year lease for the space at 4336 S.E. Woodstock Blvd. The tap house and restaurant are Double Mountain’s first outside Hood River, and the brewery’s ownership is aiming for a mid-July opening, marketing coordinator Anneke Ayers said.

“All of our permits are in place and we’re moving forward right now,” she said.

The project team is awaiting delivery of custom-made specialty windows, Ayers said.

Double Mountain had long considered a Portland expansion before pulling the trigger this year.

“We just hadn’t found anything that was just the right fit,” Ayers said. “We contemplated it for a while. We just felt it was a good time.”

The general contractor for the project is Pacific Crest Construction Inc. of Wood Village. The architect is Erik Matthews of Portland’s EM Architecture LLC.

A spate of recent brewery construction has taken place recently in Portland and along the coast: Fat Head now has a brewery in the Pearl District, and Pelican Pub & Brewery has a new location in Cannon Beach.

Double Mountain’s Woodstock location previously housed Mickey Finn’s Brew Pub and Kilt. TKMR LIM LLC has owned the property since 2005, according to city records. The limited-liability company is associated with Chheng Ly Lim of Tigard.

Double Mountain was founded in Hood River in 2007, and now offers beers such as Vaporizer, Hop Lava, IRA and Kolsch. The restaurant also serves pizza, salads and other fare. Craft cocktails are also part of the mix.

All of Double Mountain’s beer will continue to be brewed in Hood River, Ayers said.

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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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A nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving , a Silverton residence designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1963, is seeking donations to help pay for its upkeep.

The Gordon House Conservancy has launched a monthlong crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000 for roof and balcony repairs at the only Oregon home designed by Wright. The organization operates the house as a museum in the Oregon Garden and aims to promote Wright’s legacy and principles of organic architecture. The house is open to the public for guided tours and can be rented for private events.

A full roof replacement was funded partially through a grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. Duro-Last Roofing, Competitive Commercial Roofing and Pacific Crest Construction also donated labor and material to the project. But when the existing roof was removed, workers discovered a significant amount of dry rot and decay that added to the project’s cost and complexity.

Donations via crowdfunding will pay off the cost of the new roof and pay for a planned restoration to the home’s west balcony. The latter project – designed by Tim Richard, GBD Architects and KPFF Consulting Engineers – is ready to enter the permitting phase as soon as money is secured.

Contributions to the fundraising campaign can be made online at .

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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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A major renovation is taking place at a historic hotel built in 1911 in downtown Portland. The finished project is planned to open May 3, McMenamins announced today. When work wraps up this spring, the McMenamins Crystal Hotel, a four-story, triangular building at the corner of Southwest Stark Street and 12th Avenue, will have 51 rooms on the upper floors, a restaurant on the ground level and a spa and bar in the basement. General contractor Pacific Crest Construction Co. is in charge of the remodel designed by Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects.

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The McMenamins On Broadway, a Northeast Portland restaurant, is expanding. A balcony pub, with openable windows, will be added to the restaurant, which is on the second floor of a building at 1532 N.E. Broadway. The renovation project is being built by Pacific Crest Construction and was designed by Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects.

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