Construction and Real Estate
Making Inroads in Hospitality

By Matt Maile

A local architectural firm is making inroads into the national hospitality industry and taking advantage of demand for new hotels, a move that the firm’s owners say could help double their business by 2004.

Socrates Lazaridis, principal architect of Renaissance Architects in Oklahoma City, said his firm has had increasing success developing hotel designs for the hospitality industry. The company currently has nine hotel projects under way and others on the drawing board.

“A year ago I never thought that we’d be as busy as we are now,” said Lazaridis, sitting in a conference room surrounded by renderings of hotel projects. “It’s been a great year for us.”

Renaissance Architects, 11100 Stratford Dr. in Oklahoma City, handles an array of architectural work but in recent years has specialized in work for the hospitality industry. The company’s three licensed architects and staff of about 10 personnel do design work for several hotel and motel franchises, including Wingate Inn, AmeriSuites, Country Inn & Suites, Comfort Inn, Days Inn and Best Western.

The company got its start by offering lower-cost alternatives to the prototype hotel designs of many franchises, he said. Those lower-cost designs have since caught the attention of some of the hotel operators, who are now asking Renaissance Architects to develop prototypes for franchise hotels to be developed nationwide.

“We do about four to five hotel projects a year in the range of $3.5 million to $5 million each,” he said. “We are averaging about $20 million a year in projects. We can double this in 2004.”

So far, Lazaridis says the hotel projects are providing his firm with steady work, which is evident in the number of hotels now under construction.

Recently, construction was completed on an 80-room AmeriSuites in Midwest City that was designed by Renaissance Architects. The $5 million building has 49,299 square feet and opened in April.

Another 80-room AmeriSuites designed by the firm is under construction on Northwest Expressway in Oklahoma City. The building expected to cost about $3.1 million to build, excluding the cost of the land and furnishings that are part of the project.

Construction also is under way on a $3.5 million 69-room Sleep Inn hotel at the intersection of SE 122nd Street and Interstate 35 in Oklahoma City. The 38,000-square-foot, three-story building is about 60 percent completed ahead of its year-end opening, he said.

Outside of the metro, Renaissance Architects has several other hotel project in various phases of development. The firm is designing hotels for developers in San Antonio, Texas; Elkton, Md.; Plainfield, Ind.; Monroe, La.; Las Vegas; Henderson, Nev.; and Pacific, Mo. The company also is beginning planning for two Wingate Hotels in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

“Right now we have nine hotels that are in the works, and I have two to three more that are ready to start,” he said. “The hospitality business had doubled for us in the past year.”

The architect said he attributes the growth in the hospitality development business to three factors. Lower interest rates have made funding hotel developments more affordable, construction costs have softened, and his company has been able to take advantage of its marketing and experience in the hospitality business.

In addition to the market factors driving hotel construction, what has generated business for Renaissance Architects, Lazaridis said, has been the firm’s approach to cost-efficient hotel design.

In what he calls value engineering, Lazaridis takes the prototype hotel designs for some of the business’s top franchises and then redesigns them to reduce the construction costs. The changes – which can range from varying floor plans to substituting building materials – can lower the cost of a hotel project in some cases by $500,000 to more than $1 million.

“We have successfully value-engineered prototypical designs resulting in construction savings of 10 to 25 percent of the total construction cost,” he said.

The redesigned hotels have attracted the attention of hotel developers.

Recently, developers of a proposed AmeriSuites hotel asked Renaissance Architects to help find ways to reduce the construction cost of the planned new hotel. Lazaridis’ firm started with a prototype AmeriSuites design that was recommended by the hotel company and found a way to cut 25 percent of the construction cost.

“We were able to reduce the construction cost by $1 million, with no loss to the design image or function of the building,” he said.

Renaissance Architects is now taking its value engineering approach to a new level. The company has “value engineered” several prototype designs for hotel chains AmeriSuites, Days Inn, and Sleep Inn that it hopes will be used in those hotel developments nationwide.

The prototypes designed by Renaissance Architects have already generated some national attention. Lazaridis said he has worked with hotel operators Cendant Corp., Prime Hospitality Corp., Choice Hotels International and Best Western International on their hotel designs. More recently, he’s been commissioned by Cendant to design the company’s new Days Inn prototype.

Later this year, Lazaridis will travel to a conference in New Jersey, where the hotel prototypes and value engineering will be discussed with industry executives.

The hotel design work accounts for about 35 percent of the business at Renaissance Architects. Lazaridis, who recently hired an architect intern to help with the rising workload, said he expects the business to continue to strengthen near term.