popular downtown santa fe hotel to see facility addition

A Santa Fe hotel once owned by legendary New York developer Bill Zeckendorf, Jr., has received a green light to build a new swimming pool and pool space.

Located at 309 W. San Francisco Street, the Eldorado Hotel & Spa, which is today operated by Heritage Hotels and Resorts, has secured the approval of Santa Fe’s Historic Districts Review Board for the pool project.

According to documents submitted to the board, the project will see the pool built on the east side of the hotel, facing Palace Avenue, and will additionally reconvert current storage space for a new bar.

Those documents, authored by the Santa Fe-based architectural firm of Lloyd and Associates, also emphasize that the stucco color of the addition will be done in a way so as to blend with the “existing custom color.”

With more than 200 rooms, the Eldorado is the largest hotel of its kind in Santa Fe, with a total of 170,000 square feet of building space.

Members of the Historic Districts Review Board stipulated that a series of cross beams to be installed at the new pool site must be made of wood and not tube steel as originally proposed.

Heritage Hotels and Resorts, which owns several other hotel properties in Albuquerque and Las Cruces, among other New Mexico locations, acquired control of the Eldorado in the spring of 2014.

By Garry Boulard

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