The formal application for authorization to convert the vacant Spring Valley Water Company Building at 425 Mason Street, which was originally designed by Willis Polk and built in 1922, from an office building into a 77-room AC Hotel by Marriott has been submitted to the City.
Purchased for $6 million in 2011, the corner building which sits a block from Union Square has been gutted above the ground floor.
But as proposed by Stanton Architecture, the building’s remaining vestibule, clock, mural and vault door will be incorporated into to the new hotel, which will include a new 750-square-foot lobby bar fronting Mason Street as well.
As we first reported last month, plans for a new 211-room hotel to wrap around the 425 Mason Street building have been drafted as well.
Now that is a handsome building. Despite needing a paint job – with special attention paid to the ground floor – and new windows. Great roofline complimented by the border trim one floor below.
The hotel vacancy rate must be low as it seems there are a good number of small to mid-size hotels in the works. Just noticed the other day from the T line a new hotel going up across from AT&T park. Kitty corner from where the “make my day (or is it bed)” hotel is set to go up.
Quick quiz: what OTHER – and famous – building was known as the “Spring Valley Water Co. Bldg” before this one? yes that’s right….the deterioration – or at least simplifcation – in standards was well underway (even) a century ago.
Can’t wait to see this finished. All kinds of charming.
That’s a prime hotel location. Surprised it took this long to be developed.
You’d think one of the properties would buy the other and use the lobby for both hotels.
I’m glad something is being done with that building. Right now it’s dingy and dank and fly specked. Strange looking people, who appear to be low level office workers, quickly duck in the front door with brown takeout bags in their mits. There’s one of those lock boxes at the front door. What is picked up or what is left there? The sidewalk is gritty and littered with smushed Jack in the Box cups and very very short cigarette butts. People who wait there for buses seem uneasy about something. A renovation can’t come too soon.
That reads like a snooty beat poem.
Or part of a Film Noir script.
It sounds like the scene outside the old Hibernia Bank building back when the SFPD used to rent the basement.