Medical office plans swapped for hotel proposal in Pasadena

It’s a medical office. Wait. No. It’s a hotel.

El Segundo-based developer Welcome Group, Inc. wants to build a 195-room hotel at 550-566 E Colorado Boulevard on a site previously approved, twice, for a medical office, according to Urbanize. City officials signed off on the proposal for the property in 2015 and renewed the approval in 2018.

The hotel would be branded as an AC Hotel, a business-focused subsidiary of Marriott. The six-story building would have ground-floor retail and an upper-level bar.

West Hollywood-based Charles Company owns the development site and first sought approval for a medical office building there in 2014.

The city approved a 110,000-square-foot building a year later. The hotel proposal first surfaced in September 2020 with a submission to city planning staff.

The Pasadena Design Commission saw a preliminary presentation of the project this week and a formal review could come at a later date.

A few AC Hotels have opened around Los Angeles in recent years, including one in El Segundo developed by Welcome Group and a 176-room hotel in Beverly Grove.

While the coronavirus pandemic hammered the L.A. hospitality industry, new construction projects typically take several years to work through approvals and complete construction, when the market is expected to be well into recovery.

[Urbanize] — Dennis Lynch