The owner of prime vacant land across from Lake Eola has filed plans seeking a zoning change for a 37-story tower with a luxury hotel and branded residences.
The .63-acre lot at 170 E Washington St. was previously approved for a seven-story, 155-key Cambria Suites. Now the owners have engaged land use attorney Jason Searl, with Maynard Nexsen, to rezone the property for a new landmark tower.
Miami-based Kobi Karp Architecture & Interior Design leads the creative team. The firm has designed similar projects, including two Four Seasons-branded properties in Fort Lauderdale and Surfside.
They are seeking a new Planned Development zoning to accommodate a 221-room luxury hotel with 252 dwelling units above. They are also asking for the flexibility to swap the hotel use for 135,000 square feet of office space, based on market demand.
“We envision an exciting and transformative mixed-use project with separate residential, hospitality, and ground floor retail / food and beverage components,” Searl wrote in his application. “Ideally, the development would contain a branded luxury hotel and condominiums with complimentary amenities, and parking spaces, a first-to-market in the City’s Central Business District.”
With a proposed height of 420 feet, the new tower would be approximately the same height as The VUE at Lake Eola (428 feet) and the Orange County Courthouse (416 feet).
Searl wrote that the project “is carefully designed to respect and enhance its surroundings rather than compete with them.” The rounded corners are meant to complement the shape of the bandshell at Lake Eola Park.
“Its sculpted contemporary form, softened by elegant horizontal lines and rounded corners, gives the tower a refined architectural identity while maintaining an inviting pedestrian scale at street level,” he wrote.
The ground floor is intentionally set back to create a tall open plaza at the base of the building “preserving visual openness along the street and intentionally exposing the church’s historic façade and stained-glass windows as a celebrated part of the public realm.”
The plan shows hotel amenities over the six-level parking garage and residential amenities on the 19th floor. There is a single restaurant on the ground floor, but no meeting or event space typically found in a luxury hotel. There are also separate lobbies and elevators for the hotel guests and residents.
Currently, the lot on the corner of Washington and Rosalind Avenue is vacant. In 2018, a joint venture between California-based Stratus Development Partners and Sunny Isles Beach-based developer HB Capital Group, purchased the lot for $3 million with plans to build the 155-room Cambria hotel. Orlando’s Municipal Planning Board approved plans for the eight-story hotel in 2017. About a year later, the joint venture revised design plans. They tweaked the design a third time in 2019 but never moved forward with the hotel project.
In 2023, Lincoln Property Co. eyed the property, along with the adjacent parking lot owned by St. George Orthodox Church, for a mixed-use tower but did not close the deal.
In 2022, Summa Development Group won approval for a mixed-use J.W. Marriott Hotel and Convention Center with a large, rooftop wedding venue and branded residences in downtown Orlando, but the project stalled.
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