DALLAS— To look at the 240-room Hilton Garden Inn Dallas, which opened its doors this spring, one wouldn’t guess it formerly operated as a Wilson World hotel for several years. The property, the second completed conversion in the Hilton Garden Inn chain, was gutted and redesigned by Rockville, MD-based architect/design firm Jonathan Nehmer + Associates (JN+A), which also headed up HGI’s first conversion in Phoenix. Initially, the idea for converting the Wilson World into a HGI was brought to JN+A by Bedrock II, former owners, in May of 2001. After several attempts to finance the project fell through, Songy Partners, a real-estate development firm, took over the project. Songy bought the Wilson World hotel in 2003 for $7.5 million, and put an additional $12 million aside to convert the property to the HGI brand, which lacked presence in the Dallas market at the time. “We really felt strongly about the Hilton Garden Inn brand here, since it did not have a location in the Dallas area. It took some convincing with the Hilton folks because it did not fit the profile of an HGI as it existed,” said Richard Patton, senior development officer, Songy. JN+A’s original designs for Bedrock remained intact through the change in ownership, with only minor modifications and a few upgrades thrown in to ensure compliance with brand standards. And after a brief delay during construction documentation by Songy, the project started construction in September 2003. Completed on schedule and on budget, the Hilton Garden Inn Dallas opened for business on March 18, 2004. The eight-story concrete & metal panel construction building did offer quite a few challenges, however, the greatest of which was an existing eight-story atrium at the hotel’s entrance. Since atriums are not a standard feature for Hilton Garden Inn, the architect/designer had to devise a clever way of disguising the atrium as a pavilion, the standard welcome area for HGI hotels. To do this, JN+A convinced the owners to demolish an existing porte cochere, and created a two-story pavilion look to the atrium entrance inside by scaling down the lines of the tall structure with millwork and a creative trellis. “The largest issue we had to deal with right away was the one of the atrium lobby/entrance area. HGI standards called for a pavilion, so we created a look, a portion of a pavilion so to speak. We had to plan things very carefully. It was important to the owner and the brand to keep the relationship of the features of HGI intact. In the end, we created sort of a transparent structure within a structure (atrium) so it looks as though you are in a typical Hilton Garden Inn pavilion,” said Jonathan Nehmer, president of JN+A. In addition, JN+A added two eight-story “signature” towers to the front of building flanking the new pavilion entry. In order to do this, JN+A called for the removal of all exterior insulation coating, and “designed a new EIFS exterior with reveals and repainted the entire building,” said Nehmer. However, just behind the front desk was another challenge— three unsightly elevator banks, said Nehmer. “We had to come up with a clever way to divert the eye from the back side of the elevators, which were dark and unattractive,” Nehmer said. A cornice was created behind the front desk, which sits atop four columns and features a pointed “roof” design, hiding the elevator banks in the background. Other project challenges, according to JN+A, included the need for increasing the appearance of ceiling height in the meeting room area, which was only approximately nine feet from floor to ceiling, and could not be changed due to the building’s slab construction. “We used tricks to give the feeling of a higher ceiling in the meeting rooms, including the introduction of drywall coffers,” said Nehmer. In all, the Hilton Garden Inn features more than 4,600 square feet of meeting space including two board rooms at 340 square feet each, 10 meeting rooms at 320 s
