WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — Growing the Hotel Riverwalk took a year of planning, months of renovations and weekly trips from Ohio to Wilmington and back for Troy and Carla Reed. But with the eight-room hotel’s first month of business under their belts, the Reeds are starting to see all the time they put in pay off.
Troy, a lawyer, and Carla, whose background is in corporate retail, started looking seriously at the hospitality industry last year. The Ohio couple felt it was time for a change - in both profession and scenery.
They knew they wanted to be in a downtown setting, preferably somewhere warm. Though they’d never been to Wilmington, a property at 117 S. Second St. caught their attention while digging through online listings: the former site of the Clarendon Inn, which closed in 2012.
“We came down and looked at it, and that was it,” Carla said. “You could see the potential…. It just kind of checked off all the boxes that we had in our mind.”
After closing on the property in February, the couple spent four months trading off between renovating the hotel in Wilmington and staying with their two sons in Ohio. Amid carpet installation and painting, they sent a son to college, put their house on the market and moved three states south with their younger son.
The result is a small boutique inn with eight rooms instead of Clarendon’s 11 - the Reeds live in a now-walled off part of the hotel. But they worked hard to make the rooms cozy and comfortable, bringing in new beds and flat-screen TVs, constructing a guest lounge and a grab-and-go breakfast area. Before it was the Clarendon, the circa-1950s building was a Catholic school, and the Reeds designed their space to balance its old-fashioned feel with modern amenities.
“We’re really trying to cater to folks that want to have a good experience in Wilmington,” Troy said. “It’s a destination. We have everything that you would have at the Courtyard or different places; it’s just a different vibe.”
Talk about hotel growth in Wilmington usually focuses on the six-story Courtyard Marriott that opened downtown this year, or the Embassy Suites planned for near the Convention Center. But smaller inns like Hotel Riverwalk account for a lot of business downtown.
According to numbers from the Wilmington and Beaches Convention & Visitors Bureau, small inns and bed and breakfasts add nearly 60 rooms to Wilmington’s unit total, mostly in the downtown Historic District. While the lion’s share of the nearly 4,600 hotel rooms in the city are in limited-service hotels and motels, boutique hotels meet a demand for upscale yet inexpensive spaces within walking distance of downtown.
In Hotel Riverwalk’s block are the Hotel Tarrymore, the Wilmingtonian and the Graystone Inn; Stemmerman’s Inn on Front Street is just a block away.
Tarrymore owner Jeff Jones said he’s delighted the Reeds have set up shop in the old Clarendon space. He said downtown innkeepers are deeply neighborly; if his eight-suite hotel is full, he refers customers to other inns.
“We were thrilled to have them across the street; they’ve done a fantastic job renovating the building, and it’s a terrific addition to the block,” he said. “Even though we’re competition, we always refer people to our neighbors across the street.”
The Reeds said the support they’ve gotten from other hotels and the visitors bureau has been a huge help. While there’s still work to do on promoting the Hotel Riverwalk, not to mention running it, they’re also enjoying getting to know their new hometown.
“We’ve lived in many different areas, and Wilmington just has its own way. And we like that,” Carla said. Sometimes, “we want to be tourists too.”
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Information from: The StarNews, https://starnewsonline.com
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