Tight Fit

Hotel designers make the most of small space

By Chris Thompson
Editor at large

Kahler Slater's work designing the Hilton Madison at Monona Terrace was the equivalent of figuring out how to parallel park in a space half the size of the car.

The Milwaukee-based architectural firm first took interest in the project in 1996, when it teamed up with Marcus Hotels and Resorts to provide a hotel to complement the city of Madison's Monona Terrace on Wilson Street, said Lou Stippich, Kahler Slater principal and leader of the firm's hospitality team. At the time, the city, which was aiding the project funding through a tax incremental finance district, had proposed placing the hotel across the street from the convention center on a wide open, half-block site.

"We did a proposal, and in working with the Marcus people, we thought it was too far away from the convention center," Stippich said.

"The original site introduced costs that drove the project cost up. The proposed skywalk bridge to the convention center would have been three times longer than the bridge we ended up with."

So Kahler Slater opted to do things the hard way. The firm worked up a new proposal to place the hotel on the same side of Wilson Street as Monona Terrace, said Doug Nysse, designer and hotel planner for Kahler Slater.

"Basically, the site we were dealing with was an envelope created by constraints from the buildings around it," he said.

Boxed in

The new site was bordered on the west by the Madison Club; the north by the former Archdiocese of Madison building, which is listed as an historical landmark and posed additional issues; the east by the Bellevue Apartment Building; and the south by a cliff and the parking structure for Monona Terrace.

As if that wasn't difficult enough, Nysse said, the project faced constraints below from the water table for Lake Monona and above from a Madison height restriction that no building could rise higher than the rotunda of the state Capitol.

"Within that envelope, we had to fit enough guest rooms to make the financial pro forma for the hotel," Nysse said. "Based on the shape of the site, we wouldn't have met those requirements, so we put the elevator core in the middle of the building and extended the rooms toward the lake."

Stippich said shifting the elevator core had a ripple effect throughout the entire structure. Instead of a typical double-loaded hotel corridor, the hotel's rooms were pushed apart, creating "a racetrack corridor around the elevator."

"We had a relatively small footprint to deal with," Stippich said. "When you account for all of the constraints, our exposure to Wilson Street was about 80 feet. That's a small front door."

Facing the pressure of a minimum 232-guest-room quota, Kahler Slater reduced the 260,000-square-foot hotel's ceiling height from the typical 9 feet to 8 feet 9 inches, Nysse said.

"That was interesting with the mechanical systems, so we worked very closely with the contractor and consultants to make sure we were able to achieve that," he said.

More challenges

Before breaking ground in 1999, Kahler Slater had to ride the roller coaster of city review boards and make sure it appeased the hotel's soon-to-be neighbors. The architects set up agreements with the Madison Club because the new hotel would use some of the club's parking surface, and then, Nysse said, the firm turned its attention to the east.

"We wanted to maximize sunlight for the Bellevue Apartments, so we set the top of the hotel back to increase sunlight, and at the same time created interesting rooms inside," he said.

Despite its challenges, Stippich said the hotel project was a perfect example of the work that catches Kahler Slater's attention. And, considering that the final room count came in at 240, the firm was up to the challenge.

"The kinds of projects we look to work on are difficult, and this had all of that," he said. "It was a tight site with a challenging design, and we had to maintain the historical buildings. That kind of complexity drives us and interests us in projects."

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