JW Marriott Charlotte
JW Marriott Charlotte | Charlotte, NC
The new JW Marriott Charlotte is a 23-story luxury hotel in Charlotte's booming Uptown corridor. With 381 modern guest rooms and suites, the 345,000-sq.-ft. JW Marriott Charlotte was designed to honor Queen Charlotte and grounded in craftsmanship and captures natural light on every floor. Guests will enjoy city and sunset views from floor-to-ceiling windows in the guest rooms and 34 VIP suites. The hotel includes 22,000-sq.-ft. of event space, a full-service spa, two restaurants, and a rooftop bar complete with pool and private cabanas.
Approach
Prefabrication
After identifying the repetitive nature of the 335 identical bathrooms in the new hotel, the DPR team proposed utilizing an off-site modular prefabrication approach enabling the team to manufacture the bathrooms in a controlled warehouse environment and reduce need for laydown on the tight site. In hospitality construction, bathrooms generate the majority of punch list and coordination issues and DPR's team knew prefabrication could reduce or eliminate those issues. Utilizing Surepods, the project team prefabricated all 335 bathrooms offsite and loaded them level by level into the 23-story building over a period of 13 weeks.
DPR's team self-performed the loading of the pods into the building and often exceeded production targets. Not only did the pod deliveries occur at night, but on a crowded busy inner-city street bordered on two sides by other active construction sites.
Site
Challenges
The hotel is part of the Ally Charlotte Center, a pedestrian-friendly community, that occupies a full city block and includes 750,000-sq.-ft. of office space, 30,000-sq.-ft. of ground-level retail, a public plaza, and 1,400-space parking garage. Built concurrently, DPR coordinated closely with the other general contractors working on site to manage work activities, deliveries, and logistics. Considered a Charlotte-Mecklenburg "Mega Project", the structures will come online at the same time and required close schedule coordination and communication. The tight urban site also presented challenges with no designed laydown or staging areas requiring the team to utilize just in time deliveries and focused on off-site prefabrication.
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