Oct. 30–A Hyatt House hotel is coming to a back parking lot at Vallco Shopping Mall.
The majority Cupertino City Council voted to give Cupertino Property Development II, LLC the go-ahead to redevelop the southeast quadrant of Wolfe Road near Interstate 280. The site would be at 10380 Perimeter Road.
Developers were granted a permit to demolish the existing parking lot and construct a five-story, 148-room hotel of approximately 102,700 square feet. The hotel will include a restaurant, bar, lounge and conference rooms built over a 35,800-square-foot, 85-car underground parking garage that contains tandem parking, according to the Oct. 21 city staff report.
Typical guest rooms would range from 290 square feet to 688 square feet, with an average size of 434 square feet. Kitchens would be included in most guest rooms. Developers were also granted permits to remove and replace 96 trees at the site and 19 off-site trees.
The hotel will join a portion of Vallco home to JCPenney, Benihana, the mall’s interior food court, and the ice skating rink. The “Vallco Fashion Park” freeway sign and its interior wireless communications facility will loom over the property.
The site is used for the Friday farmers market from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. It is likely the event will stay at Vallco but will be moved elsewhere at the property, according to city staff.
The project has been designed to accommodate a pedestrian pathway along the western portion of the property to connect to a potential future trail system adjacent to Highway 280. The project also plans to create more ways for pedestrians to move about the Vallco area.
Sidewalk reconstruction will be done along the north side of Perimeter Road with enhanced streetscape features, including street furniture, tree wells and pedestrian-scale pole lighting. The project will include some public art as well, and the hotel will also be built to obtain a LEED silver certification or an alternative reference.
The council was largely supportive of the project, despite some initial concern that the restaurant was not enough of a retail component to justify the building being 60 feet tall, rather than 45 feet. The full-service restaurant and bar will be open daily to the public with breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The city also expects to collect sales tax from the hotel, not only from the transient occupancy tax but also from restaurant patrons, bar sales and meeting space rentals.
“If it was just this little restaurant and there wasn’t the meeting area, then I think it would be more questionable, but we need more places for events in the city, and we will actually generate more dollars out of the combination of the restaurant and that meeting space than we would if it was a bunch of boutiques that nobody was going to shop at,” Councilman Orrin Mahoney said during the Oct. 21 meeting.
Applicant Edward Chan told the council that the project team hopes to pull permits in December or the beginning of 2015 and then begin a 14- to 18-month construction period.
