Boutique hotel above former Peoples Bank on Kirkwood OK’d for height
The former Peoples Bank building on Kirkwood Avenue now has a future as a 5-story 47-room boutique hotel.
That is made possible by Bloomington’s board of zoning appeals (BZA), which has granted a variance that allows for the adaptive reuse project to exceed the height that would ordinarily be allowed.
The existing building will be preserved as a part of the project.
Project architect Tim Cover, with Studio 3 Design, told the board that the existing bank building walls would not support additional construction on top of them. Cover said that means a kind of skeleton structure has to be built through the existing building.
The board’s action came at its meeting last Thursday (Dec. 21). The decision was not controversial among the three members who attended: Barre Klapper, Flavia Burrell, and Nikki Farrell.
The plan to construct a boutique hotel reflects a change of course for project owner Bailey 8 LLC (Elliot Lewis). The project was originally planned as a student-oriented housing development which would have included 21 apartments. The housing project had received site-plan approval and a related variance from the BZA in August of 2022.
In addition to the height variance, the boutique hotel project relies on an “affordable housing” incentive that is included in Bloomington’s unified development ordinance (UDO).
The incentive allows two additional stories, if the requirements are met. The most straightforward way to meet the requirements is to build affordable housing as a part of the project. But it’s also possible to meet the requirements by making a “payment in lieu” of constructing the housing.
In the case of the boutique hotel project, there’s no housing per se that is a part of the project, which makes it a non-residential project. Bloomington’s UDO has a way for a non-residential project to make use of the affordable housing incentive, by requiring a “linkage study” for such a project. The linkage study has to demonstrate “that the proposed project results in an increased demand for affordable dwelling units in Bloomington…”
The amount that has to be paid is based on a per-bedroom rate, which is set in the planning department’s administrative manual, at $20,000 per bedroom.
According to senior zoning planner Eric Greulich, who presented the case to the BZA, this project will mark the first time that a linkage study has been used, in order to comply with the affordable housing incentive requirements.
The affordable housing incentive gave the project two extra stories, which put it at five stories—which was the desired height, measured in stories. The reason that the project needed an additional height variance, in addition to the two extra stories, is that the UDO’s height limits are expressed not just in stories, but in feet.
Greulich told the BZA that the affordable housing incentives would allow for a 62-foot-tall building, but the planned building height is 71 feet 4 inches. (Greulich noted that the 69 feet 8 inch height that’s indicated in the staff report was incorrect.)
The variance was for the extra 9 feet of height. The relative mismatch between the number of stories and the planned height stems from the fact that the floor-to-ceiling heights for the existing first two stories of the building are 15 feet, instead of the more common 12 feet.
The project had received the historic preservation commission’s approval in November. The designation of the property as a “notable” historic structure came from Bloomington’s city council in June of 2022.
At last Thursday’s meeting, in her remarks about the project, BZA president Barre Klapper noted the proximity of the project to The Graduate Hotel, which stands just to the east. She said The Graduate was controversial when it was built, because of its height.
The planned boutique hotel is nearly as tall as The Graduate, Klapper said, but its design, the way it steps back on the fourth and fifth stories, would make the impact on the street level feel “less pronounced.”
Klapper said it would be good to have a second hotel near The Graduate, so that people would have another option for people to stay that is so close to Indiana University and the courthouse square.
