Maybe there are other tax benefits outside renovation, but I think if we’re talking about getting funding for a renovation that has historic designation, it does severely limit what you can do. I don’t have direct experience with this but once got a tour of The Chesterfield in Durham. I asked if they’d considered larger openings or other ways to activate the retail storefronts and they said they were unable to do so without disqualifying them from the tax incentives. They also said they were only able to get approval to add a few small windows on the upper levels and had to show that they were in keeping with the intent of the original design.
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Could they just put a giant blue glass box over the whole building so we could preserve it but wouldn’t actually have to see it?
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Clearly there will not be any retail activation or pedestrian oriented improvement with the building itself, but they do have the open gravel lot to the east. I sure hope that this is developed with pedestrian engagement in mind.
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Yes, agreed. I was just pointing out that if the reason for getting historic designation is tax benefits for the renovation, they are very limited in the modifications they’ll be able to make to the exterior… That would apply to everything, not just retail activation.
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Yeah honestly the more I think about it, the more I think both the developer and the city have completely shot themselves in the foot with this, frankly, stupid historic designation lmao
“Hey this building is really ugly and needs to be spruced up. Let’s get it some historic designation so we can utilize some tax breaks to lower our costs in renovations!!!”
gets historic designation to utilize tax breaks thus not allowing any major renovations to spruce up the ugliness 
Can someone please make sense of this for me? lmao
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Well I think the developer didn’t want to do that much renovation, and this gets them extra money. Win-win for them. For us, not so much.
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Which brings me back to my point of… why are they saving it then??? Didn’t some study show that it’d be cheaper to tear-down and redevelop rather than keep as-is in the condition it’s in???
So it’s just gonna remain a piece of shit??? WHY WOULD ANYBODY WANT TO RENT A ROOM THERE THEN??? Are they not going to just eventually lose money on their “investment” while this thing rots away with little actual renovation???
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I still say they’re going to make some minor improvements and in 15-20 years it will be torn down for redevelopment. This is dependent on how many other hotels like OMNI are built in downtown, eventually making it less desirable.
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Because you will be sleeping in an HISTORIC HOTEL!
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BINGO plus the money that they save on the outside renovation, they will hopefully put into making the inside more pleasing to the guests.
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Thanks I hate it… 
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I’m still curious if restoring the balconies will be part of the renovation. The current exterior has been modified.
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Highly doubt that. Most modern hotels don’t do balconies because… people can jump off of them
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Right, Hotel Indigo also seems to be a great brand. Most of the important money-making aspects of the hotel will be the interior designs and rooftop restaurant experience.
If they restore the original rotation feature of the top floor, it’ll be a game changer. It would be a top competitor for being the best rooftop restaurant (if the food matches the environment).
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Agreed, a lot will depend on how they renovate and decorate the interior.
However, I do not believe the restaurant ever rotated. Can someone verify the correct answer for us?
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You are correct. It’s an urban legend!
It doesn’t even pass the smell test. Imagine someone investing in that in the early 70s when Raleigh only had 122K residents and the county wasn’t even double that.
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This building has a long life ahead of it. If it outlives its usefulness as a hotel, then an apartment conversion like the ones in Denver and Syracuse could provide some badly needed affordable housing downtown. I’m not really eager for Raleigh to be the first city to tear down an original round Holiday Inn.
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I’ve stayed in a few more modern ones in bigger cities, but I consider them sort of a 3 star hotel. Which is fine, but Kimpton is definitely a higher end brand, which would be nice to see for our downtown. The one in RTP (which has rebranded since) looked like this, so maybe don’t set our expectations too high. 
(look, already got the exterior color scheme matching DTR)
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Honestly, there’s so much that could be done from a ‘light-scaping’ perspective now with LEDs that I’m leaning into the idea that this thing could be boring-beige by day and stylishly-lit at night with some modest exterior accents / embellishment and that’d be a win. Indigo typically makes tasteful decisions, so fingers crossed that the roof top amenity glow-up does become a jewel.
*Take the next step and develop the parking lot into a retro-mod leaning 7 story with ground floor activation, three -to-four floors of parking and two-to-three more floors of rooms and/or meeting space and they’d have significantly expanded the optionality and attractiveness of that property….
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They could do all that, but I have no confidence they will. Meanwhile, release the damn renderings already!
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