The Delamar Greenwich Harbor hotel in Connecticut will undergo extensive renovations early next year, a project that aims to enhance a property that has been recognized as one of the best hotels in the region by a leading travel publication.
Scheduled to start in January and be completed in the spring, the renovations will take place in the south wing of the 82-room hotel at 500 Steamboat Rd. The work will include top-to-bottom upgrades to the wing's 65 guest rooms and bathrooms, as well as improvements to the wing's corridors. Additionally, the kitchen of the hotel's restaurant, L'escale, will be renovated.
In total, the refurbishment will cost "many millions of dollars," according to officials at Greenwich Hospitality Group (GHG), the Mystic, Conn., hotel developer whose portfolio includes the Delamar properties.
"The rooms will be totally brought up to date, and they will look and feel different from a design and decorative point of view," said Charles Mallory, founder of GHG, in a recent interview with CT Insider. "We want to keep the existing traditional charm that the hotel and rooms have but make a transition toward a more contemporary look."
Delamar Greenwich Harbor will remain open during the renovations, as the 17 rooms in the hotel's north wing are not being renovated. L'escale will temporarily close in January, but for no more than two weeks, GHG officials told CT Insider.
Over the past year, a number of other improvements have been made at the hotel, including upgrades to the ballroom, promenade and outdoor terrace.
Delamar Greenwich Harbor opened in 2002 and has since earned a number of awards and recognitions, including its being ranked the No. 3 hotel in the northeast by Condé Nast Traveler's 2023 Readers' Choice Awards. Those results were just announced in early October.
New Delamar Hotels Going Up in Westport, Mystic
Even as the renovations in the Greenwich hotel were announced, a pair of other new Delamar hotels in the Connecticut towns of Westport and Mystic are currently undergoing construction — both of which are scheduled to open in late 2024.
"We've been working primarily on the site work — the foundations, concrete and the things that go underground like plumbing, wiring and sewers," Mallory told CT Insider. "Things will start getting vertical very soon."
In Westport, that new Delamar hotel will replace the former Westport Inn, which was one of a number of hotels across the state to close in the wake of economic shutdowns during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Construction of the 86-room Delamar Westport, at 1595 Post Road E., entailed knocking down the front building earlier this year. A new wing, with 48 guest rooms and suites, will soon be built on the property's west side.
Another building on the back of the older hotel's footprint will be refurbished to include 38 guest rooms, and renovations are to be made to the public areas such as the indoor swimming pool. In addition, a new restaurant will be built in that structure.
Delamar Westport will stand about 1.5 mi. west of Delamar Southport, and accompany The Inn at Longshore in Westport, about 5 mi. southwest, an establishment whose lease GHG took over in the fall of 2020.
"Since Delamar Southport has only 44 guest rooms, we saw the opportunity to add more rooms to our portfolio at that end of Fairfield County," Dixon Mallory, GHG's director of business development and Charles Mallory's son, told CT Insider in April. "And at The Inn at Longshore, we have a significant banquet capability there. We're really looking forward to cross-marketing all three properties to much larger groups."
About 80 mi. east of the Westport hotel, GHG is building a hotel at 105 Greenmanville Ave., on the Mystic Seaport campus, part of the village of Mystic and town of Stonington.
Aside from the demolition of the building that housed the former Latitude 41 restaurant, the Mystic project involves ground-up development, CT Insider reported. There will be two new structures, the first of which is designed to have 30 guest rooms, a restaurant, and a ballroom; the second building will include a cottage with a guest suite and a living room.
Charles Mallory's Dreams Have Been Realized
The Mallory family's roots in Mystic go back to the early 19th century. Charles Mallory's grandfather, great uncle and father all served as presidents of the Mystic Seaport Museum, which was founded in 1929.
In 1999, he fulfilled a life-long dream of being in the hotel and restaurant business when he founded GHG, which now owns and operates both boutique hotels and restaurants.
After the hotels in Westport and Mystic open, there will be six Delamar properties in operation. Besides the two new ones, and the hotels in Greenwich and Southport, there is also a Delamar in West Hartford, and one outside Connecticut, in Traverse City, Mich.
Today's top stories
