Vancouver's largest hotel project in decades gets City Council approval

29-storey hotel tower with rooftop pool proposed next to Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver

New renderings of Western Canada's tallest tower in downtown Vancouver, featuring an observation deck attraction

Construction begins on Marriott's 30-storey Moxy and Elements hotel in downtown Vancouver

Hilton Hotel with nearly 400 rooms to be built at future Oak-VGH SkyTrain station

Proposed new Vancouver floating hotel includes onboard public restaurants and bars

30-storey tower with a Marriott hotel and rental homes proposed for Yaletown in downtown Vancouver

100% boutique hotel conversion for office tower near Vancouver Convention Centre Centre

Vancouver City Council approves new policies to catalyze more hotel projects

There will be 586 hotel guest rooms, along with restaurants, lounges, retail, and ample amenities for guests, including an expansive outdoor lounge with a swimming pool and hot tub on the tower rooftop. An entire level, the third floor, is dedicated to conference and meeting rooms.

In terms of the number of hotel rooms, this single tower will be the city of Vancouver’s third-largest hotel — just behind the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre’s 746 rooms and Hyatt Regency Vancouver’s 650 rooms, but ahead of the 517 rooms in Parq Vancouver’s JW Marriott and The Douglas properties and the 499-room The Westin Bayshore. This is Vancouver’s largest hotel project in decades.

The project will provide a meaningful addition to Vancouver’s highly constrained hotel room supply, provide much-needed additional event space, and rejuvenate a struggling area of the city centre.

Existing condition:

Future condition:

During the public hearing, a representative of the project team told City Council that they intend to move quickly into the development permit application process after rezoning, with construction beginning in 2026 and the completion and opening by late 2028 or early 2029. At this early stage, no hotel brand has been identified, but the calibre of the design and amenities suggests the property will be positioned as a mid- or high-end accommodations option.

“I rarely comment on the architectural aspect of some of the items that come to Council. I don’t consider myself much of an expert in that space, but I do really love the design. I think it’s actually gonna be a beautiful addition to the city landscape and cityscape. And as we noted earlier, we are in huge need of hotel rooms,” said ABC city councillor Lisa Dominato during the public hearing.

Green city councillor Pete Fry said the hotel project is a welcome change from the existing major parkade structure.

“That parking lot really destroyed that corner in so many ways. It’s a big, ugly 1980s era parking lot that did not contribute to the neighbourhood. So I love the fact that this development is coming forward, honouring the heritage of the two buildings that you’re preserving and enhancing,” said Fry.

“I’m so jazzed by this whole project because honestly, that’s such a special part of the city that is deserving and needing of a little bit of injection of life and excitement. And I think these hotel rooms are gonna be the ticket to do it.”

The rezoning application was first submitted in February 2023, but there were some delays to get the proposal to a public hearing, as the City’s Urban Design Panel recommended some design changes and City staff requested that a detailed structural condition assessment be made of the 1911-built, eight-storey Lumbermen’s Building fronting Richards Street.

The original 2023 rezoning application proposed restoring the Lumbermen’s Building as a physically separate structure from the new hotel tower, while retaining its existing office use. However, a subsequent technical assessment concluded that preserving the entire building was not feasible, and that only the heritage facade could be retained.

In January 2025, a revised rezoning application, an addendum, was submitted, outlining major changes in the floor plan layouts from the new ability to construct a brand-new purpose-built hotel space within the Lumbermen’s Building volume, instead of retaining the existing office structure.

The original concept’s plan for setting aside the entirety of the 11th level for a very significant destination restaurant and bar attraction — including an outdoor restaurant patio overlooking the intersection below — was eliminated in the revisions. This attraction has been replaced with expanded guest amenities, namely “health and wellness” uses.

The form and massing of the building also changed, with a narrower tower width on the West Pender Street frontage, along with additional building setbacks, resulting in an overall redistribution of the density to other areas of the site. With the ability to distribute more of the density horizontally, the number of floors saw a corresponding decrease from 32 storeys in the original concept to 29 storeys, but the real height change is only a difference of five feet from 318 ft. to 313 ft.

“The conservation efforts are better served on the preservation and restoration of the heritage facade. This would crystallize the true heritage value of the building, it would unlock greater efficiencies and economies [of scale] for the new development,” reads the rationale for the different approach.

On the West Pender Street frontage, the brick facade of the 1909-built, two-storey Captain Pybus Building — named after a prominent real estate investor and ship captain — will be preserved.

As for the design of the new-build structure, it will both complement and provide some bold contrast for the two heritage facades preserved, with a nod to the area’s heritage character by providing the tower exterior with complementary tones of brickwork and sweeping, curved openings at both ground level and on the rooftop of the base podium that have an eye-catching green facade.

The main entrance’s atrium lobby is extensive, spanning the building’s length along West Pender Street and reaching up to three storeys high. This space includes a hotel restaurant and lounge.

The design also incorporates trees on various exterior rooftops and inside the enclosed atrium lobby.

“Planting is an integral component of the design, supporting the idea of the building by highlighting the recess that spirals around the building, connecting the building into the site. The extensive greenery on the building provides natural visual relief and ecological value in the downtown core, in addition to further benefits such as occupant connectivity to nature, habitat and passive cooling,” reads the design rationale.

“At ground level, tree planting both inside and out helps to connect the public realm with the hotel lobby, blurring the separation between inside and outside. This creates a larger green space to the benefit of both the hotel lobby and the public realm.”

Although hotel guests will enjoy extensive outdoor amenity spaces on the tower rooftop, there are two additional floors above this space with an outdoor pool, each a partial floor plate and totalling about 23,000 sq. ft. of office space — up from the original concept’s 14,600 sq. ft. of office space within a single partial rooftop level. This small, standalone office space at the very top of the tower suggests this will be a private office for the developer and/or hotel operations.

Down below, four underground levels will accommodate 168 vehicle parking stalls, including 144 stalls for hotel uses, five stalls for retail/restaurant uses, and 19 stalls for the office space. Previously, the original concept called for six underground levels of parking, but a shallower excavation is now made possible by the new ability to use the footprint of the Lumbermen’s Building.

No general public parking is planned; the existing parkade on the site offers up to 263 stalls of public pay parking.

Altogether, the project will generate a total building floor area of 456,000 sq. ft., establishing a floor area ratio (FAR) density of a floor area that is 20.9 times larger than the size of the 21,800 sq. ft. land assembly. This is a slight decrease from the original concept’s 446,000 sq. ft. with a FAR density of 21.4.

Marcon Developments is also proposing to build a hotel tower at 2030-2038 Barclay St., near Stanley Park’s Lost Lagoon, with the property positioned for both short-term and long-term stays. A May 2025-revised rezoning application shows this will be a 27-storey tower with 270 guest suites and a ground-level restaurant. This project is also designed by Henriquez Partners Architects.

Henriquez Partners Architects is also behind the design of Holborn Group’s proposal to redevelop the Hudson’s Bay parkade city block into a multi-tower hotel, commercial, and residential complex, including Western Canada’s tallest building of a 1,034 ft. hotel tower with 920 short-term and long-term guest suites, over 70,000 sq. ft. of ballroom, conference, and meeting space, and a striking public observation deck attraction with restaurant, bar, and lounge space at a height of over 1,000 ft.

The largest hotel currently under construction is a 30-storey hotel at 848-850 Seymour St. under Marriott’s Moxy short-term stay and Elements long-term stay brands. It will have 390 guest rooms, restaurants and bars. Construction began in Spring 2025, and it is set to open in Summer 2028.

Although such cases are exceptions, developing purpose-built hotel towers remains financially challenging in Vancouver. To improve project viability, developers are increasingly turning to mixed-use designs that combine hotel and residential uses. Market residential units on the upper floors help offset the high capital and operating costs associated with hotel operations on the lower levels.

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