🔒After three decades, hotel will fill last piece of Somerset Square’s development puzzle

A chic new four-story, 131-room Glastonbury hotel set to open in 2021 will add lodging options to a town that plays host to many business travelers.

More importantly, the AC Hotel by Marriott at 75 Glastonbury Blvd., will fill the last vacant space in Somerset Square, a popular and successful mixed-use development built in the mid-1980s that also includes a shopping center, office space, Hilton Garden Inn Hotel and Homewood Suites Hotel.

Somerset Square is Glastonbury’s second-largest taxpayer, according to the town’s grand list.

“It pretty much completes the area,” said Glastonbury Town Manager Richard Johnson. “It’s the last vacant parcel in Somerset Square. The hotel rooms will help support our local business travelers.”

The hotel will also include a 3,500-square-foot function hall for events.

The two hotels currently located in Somerset Square are the only ones in town, and are consistently booked to capacity, especially during the week, said Ned Carney, vice president of Bridgewater, Mass.-based The Claremont Co. Inc., which is developing and will manage the Marriott property.

That’s likely because the Hilton and Homewood Suites (which Claremont also owns) are just about 12 miles down Route 2 from Hartford, an area of Glastonbury attractive to out-of-towners visiting for business, Carney said.

“I think a lot of the weekday [hotel] business is the business traveler who probably is conducting business in the Hartford market, but likes staying in Glastonbury for the walkability and upscale restaurants there,” Carney said.

AC Hotels, which has operated as a subsidiary of Marriott International since 2011, differs from Marriott’s more traditional hotels mostly in presentation and amenities. The rooms feature sleek European-inspired furniture, art and hardwood floors, and the kitchen and bar offer upscale snacks like imported hand-cut prosciutto, signature cocktails and tapas, according to AC Hotels promotional materials.

“The brand has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last five years,” Carney said. “Millennials seem to be attracted to the brand, it’s a modern kind of hotel.”

While the hotel site has remained vacant for decades, it wasn’t ignored by the town, Johnson said. Before the AC Hotel proposal, Glastonbury approved Claremont’s plans to build apartments there in 2017, about a year after the company bought the 2.88-acre site for $3 million. That project never materialized, nor did a proposal to develop an assisted-living facility.

But the addition of the hotel in an area with low vacancies, should bring into town more travelers who will spend money at local restaurants and shops, Johnson said. The new building will compliment wide-scale renovations of nearby commercial buildings over the past six years.

“We have new construction, renovations and buildings that are outdated and being replaced by new buildings throughout our community,” Johnson said. “From 2013 to the present, renovations and new construction in Glastonbury totals over a million square feet.”

Investor interest

The new hotel comes at a time when the Somerset Square development has garnered significant interest from investors in recent years.

In May, Simsbury real estate investment firm Hart Realty Advisers acquired a pair of four-story office buildings in Glastonbury’s Somerset Square for $30.3 million.

The two office buildings at 180 and 200 Glastonbury Blvd., together span over 184,871 square feet.

Both buildings house numerous tenants in the insurance, financial technology, accounting and wealth management sectors, including Wells Fargo Advisors, RBC Wealth Management and Washington Trust Co-Westerly.

In Oct. 2016, Manhattan-based Rouse Properties paid $42 million for The Shops at Somerset Square, the 115,000-square-foot lifestyle shopping center at 140 Glastonbury Blvd.

Somerset Square’s retail lineup includes: Max Fish, Lux Bond & Green, Francesca’s, Victoria’s Secret, White House Black Market, Chico’s, Talbots, Chipotle and Starbucks.