A steel frame is being built for the SpringHill Suites under construction in Chester. (Jonathan Spiers photos)
Visible to motorists along I-95, the newest property of a local hotelier is taking shape at the Route 10 motorway junction and is one of several new additions to the company’s portfolio.
Chesterfield-based Sina Hospitality is about halfway through the construction of its Marriott-branded SpringHill Suites at 12301 Redwater Creek Road in Chester.
The seven-story, 122-room hotel rises on the northwest side of the Route 10 / West Hundred Road interchange. The 5-acre site is behind the Cracker Barrel restaurant and adjacent to the non-Sina Fairfield Inn Richmond Chester.
The SpringHill Suites will also be neighbors of the regional giant Shamin Hotel, which has three hotels nearby and a fourth is in the works.
Sina’s Hotel is one of three it’s actively working on after opening a Fairfield Inn in Louisville, Kentucky last month. It opens another Fairfield Inn in Louisville in June and is developing, among other objects on the drawing board, a Home2 Suites in St. Louis, Missouri.
The seven-story building rises behind the Cracker Barrel restaurant next to the motorway junction.
Construction at the Chester site began in November 2019, several months after Sina submitted plans to the county and just months before the arrival of COVID-19.
CEO Ravi Patel said the Chesterfield-based company kept the project on schedule despite the impact of the pandemic on the industry as a whole.
Ravi Patel
“We said, ‘Well, we already started, so why stop,’ and then we just prevailed,” said Patel.
Harlan Construction, based in Hopewell, is the general contractor and Nitin Kulkarni, with Glen Allen Design Enclave Consultants, is the architect. Applegate Consulting Engineers is the civil engineer and the Petersburg company The Site Design Co. is the civil engineer. Other companies involved are MEP Green Design & Build from Houston.
The $ 20 million project has been expanded to include an additional floor and four more rooms than originally planned. The hotel is scheduled to be completed in spring 2022 and will include 5,000 square meters of conference space on its lower level and a further 1,100 square meters of event space on the floor above.
Patel said the accommodations would meet demand that would otherwise be diverted to other locations in the region.
“Having a hotel with 5,000 square feet of meeting space in Chester is unknown,” he said. “We think it will be a unique opportunity to bring people who may not want to go to Short Pump or Midlothian and are just looking for a nice, fresh hotel in a central location.”
The hotel will be the third SpringHill Suites in the area and will join two in Henrico: the Richmond Northwest property at 9960 Independence Park Drive, on Gaskins Road near the I-64 interchange; and the Richmond North / Glen Allen location at 9701 Brook Road, north of I-295. These hotels are owned by Richmond’s Apple Hospitality or MCR Hotels, based in New York.
The Chester location will join the 26 hotels that make up Sina’s current portfolio, up from 15 in 2019. Central Virginia has four hotels: the Fairfield Inns on North Pinetta Drive in Chesterfield and Airport Square Lane in Sandston as well as a Candlewood Suites on Woods Edge Road in Chesterfield and a Hampton Inn on South Crater Road in Petersburg.
The construction site of the SpringHill Suites in April. (Courtesy Ravi Patel)
It is also developing two Townplace Suites in the area: one at 101 N. Providence Road in Midlothian and the other at 5252 Airport Square Lane in Sandston. Both hotels are scheduled to open in 2023.
Sina was founded in 1997 and today employs 3,000 people – a workforce that Patel said was spared layoffs or vacation during the course of the pandemic. He attributes this benefit to the location of his hotels and government support through PPP loans.
“Last year was actually pretty good,” said Patel. “We have not closed any of our hotels.”
He added, “I think this has a lot to do with how we choose locations. We are always in the suburbs for our hotels; We’re not downtown or on the beach.
“On the real estate side, we saw that many landowners wanted to dump their land just because they were short on cash. That gave us a lot of buying opportunities, and that’s one of the reasons we were able to grow a little further. “
Those opportunities included a property in Charleston, West Virginia, which Patel said was recently acquired by Sina. A Residence Inn is planned there, which Patel says will open at the end of 2023.
The company’s presence beyond Richmond extends to Lexington, Kentucky and Memphis, Tennessee in addition to its Louisville and St. Louis properties.