18th Street hotel developer offers plan with additional green space

The city council is set to hold a public hearing for a proposed 18th Street South hotel's development plan and rezoning. At tonight's council planning and development committee meeting, developer Mike Mouron presented an option to add more greenery to the property.

Mouron is planning a five story, 129-room Curio by Hilton hotel, as well as a restaurant and hotel bar, on the former Little Professor and Hatfield Auto locations at 2713-2739 18th Street South. The hotel would include an indoor pool, ballroom, meeting rooms and outdoor dining, and Mouron said room rates would be lower than the Grand Bohemian in Mountain Brook.

Mouron also said the deal with the Curio brand has been finalized.

Tonight, Mouron and Scotty Stanford said they intend to replace the Wolf Camera building with a full-service spa comparable to the spa at Renaissance Ross Bridge in Hoover. The potential spa would likely be two stories.

"We think it’s a perfect complement to the hotel,” Stanford said.

The developers are also under contract to purchase the gravel parking lot at the corner of 27th Avenue South and 18th Place South to meet parking requirements for the development, with about 211 spaces in total.

At tonight's meeting, Mouron presented a new drawing with more landscaping and paths fronting 18th Street. That concept, however, is dependent on a city project, approved in 2015 and funded by an APPLE (Advanced Planning, Programming and Logical Engineering) grant, to give 18th Street a makeover. The plans include narrowing the road and reducing the number of lanes as well as adding landscaping, lighting and parking spaces.

Those new city diagonal parking spaces would run in front of the hotel and spa, allowing Mouron to replace some of the existing parking with landscaping.

“I wanted you to understand what I’m willing to do if indeed this project does take place,” Mouron said. “Because of the scale, mature vegetation does not bother us because it does not obscure our signage.”

Ward 1 Representative Britt Thames, who has been one of the main drivers for the streetscape project, said it will be funded for engineering in the 2017-2018 budget and potentially construction in 2018-2019.

However, this proposed plan is not the one up for public hearing and approval at the Sept. 11 council meeting. The development plan and rezoning are based on the drawings Mouron and Stanford submitted to the planning commission, which have a reduced amount of landscaping. Mouron's proposed plans would only come into existence once the city created the streetscape project.

The Sept. 11 council meeting begins at 6 p.m. at City Hall.

Also tonight, the finance committee approved an agenda item for an additional $7,500 in landscaping for the ServisFirst headquarters in Rosedale, which will be considered by the full council next week. Some committee members agreed to the motion with some reluctance, as the city has already given $35,000 to the company for landscaping, as well as tax abatement incentives.