New downtown Stillwater hotel, set in a historic brewery, gets national attention
By Mary Divine
When it came time for developer Corey Burstad to find a partner for his $13.5 million hotel project in downtown Stillwater, he knew a standard chain wouldn’t cut it.
The space — the former Joseph Wolf Brewery block on South Main Street — was too historic and too unusual, he said.
“I didn’t want to be controlled by anyone, as to what needs to happen to this property, because there is no way I could have ever followed their rules,” Burstad said during a recent tour of the new hotel. “I just felt like I needed to bring on an operator who understood.”
Burstad, chief manager at Elevage Development Group, interviewed several firms in the Midwest before turning to Provenance Hotels, based in Portland, Ore. The firm’s portfolio includes boutique hotels in Seattle, Portland, Nashville and New Orleans.
Provenance officials toured the site “in a freezing rain on a cold spring day,” Burstad said. “It was terrible weather, and I thought to myself, there is no way they are going to like this property. We had water running through the roof. But he was, like, ‘I get it. I see what you’re doing.’ ”
What Burstad was doing was taking four separate buildings — built at different times and on seven levels — and cobbling them together to create a 30,000-square-foot hotel that includes a gourmet restaurant, craft cocktail bar and coffee shop.
The 40-room, three-story boutique hotel, called Lora, opens June 18.
The project is already garnering national attention. Architectural Digest included Lora in a list of the 15 best-designed hotels opening this summer, along with hotels in the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the Maldives.
The magazine noted that Lora “resides in a former brewery built in 1886 … and retains much of the features of a brewery, including caves, stone walls and a carriage passageway transformed into airy, livable spaces.”
Source: TwinCities.com
