Surrey City Centre is about to get a lot swankier with the addition of a 52-storey world-class Marriott (NYE:MAR) hotel that will be part of Marriott’s “autograph collection.”
The Civic Hotel at 3 Civic Plaza will not only be Surrey’s first mixed-use hotel and residential project, it will also be the tallest building on the Surrey side of the Fraser River.
“I wanted 56 [storeys],” Surrey mayor Dianne Watts joked during a press conference at the Surrey SFU campus last week when the project was unveiled.
“It really is a great day today for us to welcome such a premier hotel in the Surrey City Centre,” she said. “We have a high demand for conference space, for sure.”
“We really want to make sure our downtown core is very, very vibrant,” she added.
Construction will begin on the luxury hotel – to contain 144 rooms, a café, fine dining restaurant, gym, pool, a large convention room and catering services – in January and is expected to be completed within 33 months. It will also feature “premium residences” and professional offices.
Marriott International has 3,800 hotels, but Surrey’s will be one of the chain’s 50 special “Autograph Collection” hotels worldwide. The only other Marriott Hotel in the same category in Canada is the 120-year-old St. Andrews By-the-Sea, in New Brunswick.
The Civic Hotel was designed by Cotter Architects and ZGF Architects and is part of developer Century Group’s 3 Civic Plaza concept in City Centre.
“Together with the City Centre Library, the new city hall and 3 Civic Plaza, this hotel will be a defining fixture of our downtown,” Watts said. “It really is an amazing building.”
The new luxury hotel will mean 50 new full-time jobs in Whalley, plus more than 200 construction jobs.
Downtown Whalley has been exploding with growth, with all kinds of residential towers going up, as well as the recently opened E-Division RCMP headquarters and Surrey Memorial Hospital’s new emergency wing, which officially opened last week.
Watts noted that for the fourth year in a row, Surrey has been declared to be the best place in B.C. to invest.
“We certainly make sure that we are all doing everything that we can do to make sure that we have that standard,” she said.
Sean Hodgins, of Century Group, said the hotel will be “a place where Surrey is going to welcome the world and, in short, we need a hotel that serves the global but helps define the local.”
Scott Allison, vice-president of Marriott Hotels Resorts Canada, praised the design.
“We think it represents exactly what Surrey stands for, this sophisticated city that stands for innovation.”
