Canada's largest hotel spends $25M on upgrades but it will soon be demolished
The Chelsea Hotel has announced the completion of a massive $25 million facelift, all as a major redevelopment plan brews in the background that would see the demolition of Canada’s largest hotel.
Completion of the refurbishment was announced in early October, marking the largest upgrade to the 1975-opened hotel property since 2013.
Changes to the property include upgrades to elevators and 600 guestrooms in the hotel’s Executive Tower, and hotel corridors throughout the property. The Chelsea’s main food and beverage spaces, the Market Garden Restaurant and Elm Street Bar & Lounge, have also undergone major enhancements.
On top of the newly revealed changes, the hotel is also investing in a WiFi upgrade and spending over $2 million on streaming improvements later this fall.
Hong Kong-based Great Eagle Group, which has owned the property for almost three decades, has invested over $54 million in the property since it was rebranded from the Delta Chelsea in 2013.
However, the property’s days have been numbered since Great Eagle embarked on a plan to redevelop the site with towering skyscrapers, first proposed back in 2015.
Great Eagle’s investment in the aging 26-storey complex improves the experience for a share of the almost 1,600 guest rooms and buys the property some more time, but there are longstanding design choices that are just unable to be rectified by facelifts.
First planned as a student co-op and later a condo, the building eventually opened as a hotel in 1975, with telltale signs of its initially intended use in its exterior balconies.
Plans to replace the property at 33 Gerrard Street West have evolved in the years since first proposed, and Great Eagle is currently advancing plans for massive towers of 90, 89, and 31 storeys, designed by architects—Alliance, containing a mix of condo, hotel, office, and retail space.
The project, now known as Chelsea Green, has gone through a series of refinements in the eight years since it first landed on the desks of city planners, and is currently proposed to contain two of the tallest buildings in Canada.
If built as currently proposed, the tallest towers’ heights of 297.25 and 293.5 metres would stand as the second and third tallest buildings in all of Canada, overtaking all but First Canadian Place as the country’s tallest.
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