A vacant long-term care facility in Sudbury, Ont. is getting a temporary use as a 70-unit student residence while the four-storey building undergoes a two-year, floor-by-floor renovation into a 120-unit Best Western Plus hotel.
Sudbury entrepreneur-developer John Law never dreamed he’d be doing a conversion project of this magnitude but when the opportunity came up in May to buy the vacant facility he couldn’t turn away.
“I viewed the building on a Tuesday, put an offer in on Wednesday and they accepted the offer on Friday.”
Law calculates the hotel conversion will cost him about $15 million which includes the addition of a swimming pool and fitness centre.
Constructing a new building would cost closer to $20 million, he says.
While there will be complications ahead to complete the project, Law, who owns a number of restaurants in Sudbury, believes the conversion should be relatively straightforward.
The four-storey cast-in-place concrete building was erected 50 years ago but it is in good condition and won’t require any structural changes, he says. The rooms will remain roughly the same dimensions but bathrooms will be enlarged and modernized for hotel guests.
Currently a crew of four from his company Capital Construction are framing and drywalling several rooms on the top floor. Law’s plumbing contractor Nauss Plumbing will do retrofit plumbing work.
A new façade hasn’t been finalized but Law says it could be an EIFS product. Horizontal long boards will accent the entry and building corners.
In the meantime, the developer says he managed to get expedited approvals from the City of Sudbury for zoning changes from institutional to residential in order to house 70 students in the former long-term care facility.
It was a no-brainer for the city, he says.
“They either have someone work on the building right away and pay the property tax or let it sit empty,” he says. “We are also supplying badly needed student housing in the city.”
Roughly 12-by-20-feet, the rooms are furnished to house two students for $400 a month each.
“It’s a win-win for everybody — better for the students, better for the city and better for me.”
He adds adapting the 50-year-old building for reuse rather than seeing it demolished is important to him.
Law looked at several hotel chains before choosing the Best Western Plus because the hotelier struck a deal where he could select his own building team to do the renovations as long as the hotelier got to review the design and approve the work as it progressed.
“The other hotels I looked at would be bringing their own (building) teams up from Toronto but I wanted to keep the work here so I could employ local people.”
He has retained Centreline Architecture of Sudbury for the design.
Law, who has been a Sudbury resident since 1984, is in the process of setting up a charitable foundation using monies from some of his profitable restaurants in the city as an endowment fund.
“Sudbury made me what I am today so I want to give it back to the community.”
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