After years of stops and starts, new hotel by Monona Terrace is finally set to open (2024)

After several iterations, years of negotiations and a swapping-out of developers, a long-awaited hotel designed to serve Downtown convention business is on the cusp of opening.

The 262-room Embassy Suites by Hilton features a “monumental curved radius design,” rooms with views of Lake Monona, complimentary made-to-order breakfasts, a restaurant and bar, fitness center, meeting space and valet parking.

But the hotel’s most-anticipated amenity is its proximity to the Monona Terrace Convention Center a half-block away.

The hotel, part of the public-private $175 million Judge Doyle Square redevelopment on South Pinckney Street, will likely fill for graduation weekends at UW-Madison, Badgers home football games, Ironman and World Dairy Expo. But the nine-story hotel from development firm Mortenson, within steps of the convention center, also will be instrumental in attracting more and larger conventions and conferences. Since 2001, that role has been solely tasked to the 240-room Hilton that is connected to Monona Terrace, said Nate Gundrum, Mortenson’s vice president of real estate development.

“By creating an easy button for meeting planners, between the Hilton and the Embassy Suites, that will make the job of the convention center just a little bit easier to attract incremental convention business to the city,” Gundrum said Tuesday during a tour of the property. “Just to get to this point, where we’re opening this hotel to the public, is extremely satisfying for us and our partnership with the city.”

Despite the rise of several hotel properties in and around the city’s Downtown in the past 15 years, the Embassy Suites fills a glaring hole. Its June 20 opening comes just more than a week after state tourism officials announced that tourism spending in Dane County in 2023 set another record and increased by 9.9% to $1.5 billion. Adding more and bigger conventions to Monona Terrace will spur more tourism growth, said Ellie Westman Chin, president and CEO of Destination Madison.

“One of the complaints we get from meeting planners is that we don’t have a lot of hotels connected or within a half a block of our convention center,” Westman Chin said. “We have the Hilton, which is great, but having Embassy Suites open with that number of rooms and within a block of Monona Terrace is really a game-changer for us.”

An arduous journey

The path to completing and opening the hotel was far from smooth or certain.

In 2016 — after failed attempts to advance a project — the city chose Beitler Real Estate Services of Chicago for a project that would include a hotel, apartments, commercial space and parking on blocks that hold the landmark Madison Municipal Building and now-demolished Government East parking garage.

Beitler unveiled a bold design with curved, glass-sheathed towers on each side of Pinckney Street. But the city and Beitler had legal disputes, and in January 2019 the City Council approved paying Beitler $700,000 to give up rights on the Municipal Building block. The city eventually chose Stone House Development to build the $40 million apartment building above a $50.4 million city-owned structure with an underground parking garage, first-floor commercial space and bike center, and two floors of parking above the commercial space on that block.

After the underground Wilson Street Garage opened in June 2020, the city proceeded with demolition of the aging Government East parking garage, which would pave the way for Beitler’s two projects on that block: the hotel and potential apartments.

In late 2020, Beitler, which initially proposed a shimmering, 12-story glass-sheathed hotel, announced it would build a nine-story structure that retains the curved shape facing the street but abandons the dominant glass appearance for a mix of metal panels and glass and some masonry at the base. But a year later, in 2021, Beitler transferred its development rights to Minneapolis-based Mortenson, which included the city selling the property for the hotel to Mortenson for $4 million instead of issuing a lease.

Mortenson began building the hotel in April 2022 with 250 construction workers. When it opens, there will be 66 employees.

“From start to finish, we’ve been involved for four years, but even more gratifying is, I mean, this is a public-private partnership with the city of Madison and to help them realize their vision, which has been going on for over a decade, is really rewarding for me,” said Gundrum, whose company is also building a $140 million apartment building, parking garage and bus terminal on State and Lake streets.

Downtown amenities

Rates start at about $240 per night for the Embassy Suites and will surge to more than $500 per night at peak times, said Michael Luehrs, the hotel’s general manager, who came to Madison in 2013 to manage the downtown Hampton Inn and Suites and in 2021 opened the Hilton Garden Inn near the Kohl Center.

Of the Embassy Suites’ 262 rooms, 60% have single king beds, with the remaining 40% furnished with two queen beds. All rooms have pullout couches and locks opened via radio frequency identification fobs or through a smartphone via the Hilton Honors app. The hotel already has begun taking reservations for as far out as 2028 and 2029, and it has an agreement with the city to provide blocks of rooms for conventions, said Luehrs, who is also president of the Greater Madison Hotel & Lodging Association.

“There’s real energy behind tourism and the city believing and seeing the potential of it and the value of it,” Luehrs said. “To be able to offer all of the amenities Madison has to offer in just a very short radius is a huge advantage.”

The hotel is surrounded by a variety of restaurants, ranging from steakhouses to burger joints, pizza to Japanese and seafood, and more upscale offerings like L’Etoile, Graze and Cento. There are coffee shops and breakfast spots, bars and retailers, while the Dane County Farmers’ Market can be experienced on Wednesdays on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and on Saturdays on Capitol Square.

But Embassy Suites also will offer food, with lunch and dinner service via its Brickstone Kitchen & Bar. Complementary breakfast is prepared and dished out in a separate room that includes food stations with shiny, stainless-steel serving stations, ceramic plates, juice, coffee and pastry stations, and a menu that includes made-to-order eggs and pancakes. The service stands in contrast to some hotels that charge for similar offerings or others with complementary breakfasts that aren’t as elaborate, Luehrs said.

The first floor, just off the lobby, also includes a meeting space for 60 people and two boardrooms, one with a 28-person capacity and the other that can hold 30 people. Luehrs believes the Embassy Suites will help grow tourism in the county but also knows more properties are needed: Businesses such as Epic Systems Corp. and Exact Sciences continue to grow, and there’s potential for expansion at the Alliant Energy Center.

“Madison is very forward-looking,” Luehrs said. “There’s a lot of optimism and a lot of momentum.”

Editor's note: A photo caption accompanying this story has been updated to correct the name of the hotel restaurant. It is theBrickstone Kitchen & Bar. A typographical error has also been corrected.