Located on the iconic bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee’s downtown district is a distinct representation of the city’s rich commercial and industrial legacy with rows of ornate 19th-century buildings and warehouses lining the bustling urban thoroughfares. Even today, the river continues its steady stream of barge traffic, providing a mesmerizing backdrop to this cultural melting pot where the past—from the city’s legendary blues music heritage to Elvis Presley’s Graceland—rubs shoulders with the present.
The latest additions to downtown hospitality include the Canopy by Hilton Downtown Memphis, the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis, and the Caption by Hyatt Beale Street Memphis. Each new high-profile hotel development integrates and transforms the city’s obsolete infrastructure for the benefit of tourism and contemporary livability.
“Adaptive use has become the cornerstone of redevelopment in downtown Memphis,” says Brandon Herrington, ULI Memphis Management Committee chair-elect and director of marketing and business development for Montgomery Martin Contractors in Memphis. “The hospitality sector, especially, has embraced the wealth of historical structures across the central business district. Whether wholesale reuse of a building or the salvage of prominent historical elements, these hotels are now integral to Memphis’ historical fabric.”
Mark Weaver, principal at HBG Design, the national hospitality design firm and architect of record for the three hotels, says, “Lying vacant for 20 years, the site of the former 1940s-era Benchmark hotel, a riverside lot, and its adjacent 19th-century machine shop were each initially viewed as being of limited interest to prospective tenants—some even considered them to be urban blight.”
Through a new lens, each hotel project unveiled opportunities to elaborate on existing site and infrastructure characteristics and iconic identifiers to create urban renewal that meets the community where it is now, Weaver explains.
Renewing a Gateway Site
The intersection of Union Avenue and BB King Boulevard is a crucial gateway into downtown Memphis. Before the Canopy by Hilton Downtown Memphis arrived, the dilapidated Benchmark Hotel structure occupied the site. The crumbling structure was an overall safety hazard and inhospitable first impression for travelers visiting Memphis’s grand Peabody Hotel, AutoZone Park ballpark opposite, or Beale Street and the FedEx Forum just a few blocks away.
Weaver says, “Despite difficulties posed by the existing site structures and the pandemic, the Canopy by Hilton design and construction were able to salvage and repurpose remnants of the existing Benchmark.”
The result creates an inviting new 174-key lifestyle hotel development specifically designed to extend and connect to the surrounding activity while welcoming the community.
Thor Harland, lead architectural designer at Memphis-based HBG Design, says, “The Canopy design and construction were extremely complex to navigate, given the owner’s desire to reutilize existing Benchmark Hotel building foundations and an existing underground garage. But the more problems a building design solves, the more value that building provides for the community.”
Herrington, whose company, Montgomery Martin, served as the Canopy by Hilton hotel’s contractor, says, “Our ability to reuse the existing underground garage for the Canopy project not only provided significant cost savings, but greatly reduced the impact of construction at arguably the busiest intersection in downtown Memphis.”
The conflicting structural challenges were ultimately transformed into useful square footage and a comprehensive planning and design expression. The solution informed a simplified hotel geometry above a visually transparent podium level and one level of subterranean parking, with a unique dichotomy between upper- and lower-floor masses.
The 171,100-square-foot (15,886 sq m) raised hotel block maximizes the site’s guest room potential through a double-loaded guestroom corridor ring surrounding an internal light well.
“A sense of transparency and natural daylighting in the hotel’s base level is achieved through floor-to-ceiling storefront systems along the south and east edges,” Harland explains. “Two large skylights located under the light well that amplify the restaurant, lounge, and bar amenities.”
Outdoor patio seating surrounding the restaurant on both sides further energizes this bustling marquee corner, especially during baseball and soccer games at AutoZone Park.“The Canopy is a building of its time, respecting historical precedents and the progressive concept of the Canopy brand,” says Harland. “The design evokes the characteristics of the existing network of mid-rise masonry architecture in downtown Memphis but applies a larger-scale brick-and-stacked bond pattern to differentiate from its neighbors.”
Local journalists applauded the result: “The new build went up, and, when the Canopy by Hilton opened in 2020, even amid the pandemic, one could not call the achievement of architectural and administrative willpower anything but glorious.”
A Full Historical City Block of Hospitality
Rising from the intersection of Beale Street and Front Street near the Mississippi River, the new Hyatt Centric and its adjacent sister property, the Caption by Hyatt, are a showcase of contemporary architecture and placemaking that honors the city’s iconic music legacy and its heritage of riverfront industry.
Each lifestyle hotel claims its own prominence and unique level of approachable luxury. The Caption by Hyatt is the first Caption-branded hotel to be built anywhere in the world. The Hyatt Centric is the first hotel to boast a prime Beale Street address.
“The Centric and Caption hotels were planned and designed to foster connection, embrace change, and celebrate the city today,” says Weaver. “As a dynamic hub of activity and hospitality, these projects have become a central crossroads for culture and community at the foot of Beale.”
The hotel developments were timely; the city’s riverfront has undergone a recent renaissance with the Studio Gang-led renovation of Tom Lee Park, the famed location of the annual Beale Street Music Fest and Memphis BBQ Fest.
“Through building placement and engaging design, the site transformation focuses Beale Street’s pedestrian activity through the downtown core toward the banks of the Mississippi River,” says Weaver.
“No great downtown is complete without the vitality that density and walkability provide,” adds Herrington. “The commitment by HBG Design and their development partners to include street-level activation across these hotel properties has been a boon for vibrant pedestrian activity in some forgotten pockets of downtown.”
Both Hyatt hotels are inspired by and partially created by the unique repurposing of the 1878 William C. Ellis and Sons Ironworks and Machine Shop. This former blacksmith shop was one of the earliest, longest-running businesses in Memphis, making wrought-iron straps for carriages and shoes for horses and mules and was later operated as an agricultural machinery repair shop.
The deteriorating Ellis industrial buildings remained vacant for decades, leaving this corner of downtown underused despite its location opposite the highly active Orpheum Theater.
Designers honored the inimitable history of the Ellis building by repurposing salvageable structures for the hotels’ shared conference and meeting space and the Caption’s pedestrian-level façade. “References to the Ellis building and its original use can also be found throughout each hotel’s design and detailing,” explains Weaver, “such as machine shop’s tools and castings fabricated into a unique front desk at the Hyatt Centric.”
“Similarly, the Caption by Hyatt Beale Street Memphis marries classic and contemporary design elements in a way that elevates the historical façade of the Ellis buildings to the status of artifact,” Weaver adds. “With its original stenciled signage intact, the hotel’s lower-level fenestration and elevation heights are strategically articulated to mimic the existing condition.”
Open to the street’s pedestrian walkway, a beer garden patio is uniquely housed within the Ellis building’s original façade in a way that allows guests to fully engage with the active downtown neighborhood and appreciate the relationship between old and new.
The heart of Memphis’ Caption by Hyatt is the Talk Shop, the brand’s pioneering arrival experience where guests and locals can enjoy a multi-functional all-day lounge hangout and workspace, coffee shop, eatery, grab-and-go artisanal market, and cocktail bar.
Talk Shop’s double-height lounge is enveloped by the Ellis building’s original heavy-timber framing, decorative brick walls, archways, and clerestory windows. The contemporary-meets-urban industrial aesthetic features animated colors, textures, and hand-painted murals that nod to the storied city it calls home.
“The Caption’s 136-key hotel guestroom tower is lifted to the parapet of the existing Ellis façade, respecting both the historical elevations while offering guests superb views of the river and the city skyline,” says Weaver. “The tower’s dark, modern exterior is designed to complement the lighter colored Ellis building front façade and the metal and brick materiality of the Hyatt Centric design.”
The mass of the seven-story, 227-key Hyatt Centric hotel is elevated on concrete pilotis above a first-level curtain wall that folds around an interior courtyard. Shaped to mimic the adjacent riverbank and reference the curves and shapes of musical instruments, this serpentine glass wall recesses within the hotel perimeter to create a three-sided loggia, revealing the stylish corner lobby bar, and generating active visual engagement with the pedestrian streetscape.
“When defining the Hyatt Centric hotel’s contemporary form, the design team centered their design thinking around Memphis’ musical heritage and the musically inspired ideas of flow, pitch, meter, rhythm, repetition, vibration, and resonance,” says Weaver. “This is seen in the playful staggered patterning of the exterior window placement that appears from afar to vibrate rhythmically in a visual continuation of a blues meter, as seen from the heart of Beale Street to the Mississippi River.”
This vibration is enhanced by bands of vertical color-changing lights across the hotel mass that mimic the signage and nightlife of Beale Street. “We wanted to capture the liveliness of Beale Street and carry that excitement toward the river,” adds Weaver.
These contemporary lifestyle hotel developments have built a bridge between past and present, preserving the city’s historical character while also creating modern, luxurious spaces that are accessible to all. For those lucky enough to visit or call Memphis home, the urban core has never been more alive with a diversity of architecture and entertainment experiences.
“There is a real energy to downtown Memphis since these three hotels have opened,” says Herrington. “There were always pockets of activity around the entertainment areas of AutoZone Park, Beale Street, and the Orpheum Theater. But there were tremendous dead spots where these vacant or blighted properties remained. Now, everywhere feels bright and busy, from early in the morning to late at night.”
DANA RAMSEY is a marketing communications professional with 24 years in the A/E/C industry. For 17 of those years, Ramsey has held the position of associate and marketing manager, now marketing director, at top 10 national architecture and interior design firm, HBG Design.
