Well Smart Investment Holding lodged a resource consent application in 2018 for a 260-room, nine-level building stepping up to Man St.
It later withdrew the proposal, but now it’s lodged a scaled-back version, with 149 rooms on eight levels, which fits within building limits under the proposed district plan.
Subject to approval, construction will begin ‘‘as soon as possible’’, the application says.
A modular construction method will be employed in which modules are fitted out off-site before being trucked to the site and installed.
The demolition, earthworks and retaining phase is expected to take up to seven months, and the construction phase about two years — altogether about eight months sooner than the original proposal.
The steep, 5557sqm site consists of six land parcels currently occupied by four old houses and two garages.
The houses are currently rented to residential tenants and the Salvation Army.
It’s bordered on one side by the Crowne Plaza hotel and Hay St, and on the other by The Lofts Apartments and the Man St carpark building.
Well Smart bought part of the site, once owned by Queenstown’s Skyline Enterprises, for $9 million in 2015.
The Shotover St proposal’s not the only hotel project the company has on its books in the resort.
In 2019 it was granted consent for a seven-storey, 130-room hotel on the corner of Thompson and Glasgow Sts, but it hasn’t started on that build either.
The reason for the delays was revealed in the company’s February submission to the Environmental Protection Agency on Queenstown council’s resource consent application for its arterial bypass project.
Well Smart counsel James Gardner-Hopkins said progress on both hotels had ‘‘stalled’’ in large part because of uncertainty over how the bypass would affect Man and Thompson Sts.
The company would probably have started building, if not completed, both hotels by now ‘‘if not for the uncertainty around the timing and extent of the project’’.
