Ensemble Eyes 350-Room Hotel on Oyster Point in South SF

Ensemble Investments aims to build a 350-room luxury hotel with sweeping Bay views on Oyster Point in South San Francisco.

The Long Beach-based developer is filing plans to build the 12-story hotel at 367 Marina Boulevard, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Ensemble agreed to pay the city $1 million in October 2021 for the 4.7-acre site, four years after it was chosen as the preferred builder.

Plans call for a 350-room hotel, 100 more than the developer envisioned when it bought the site. The project will include a restaurant, ballroom, meeting rooms, a gym and rooftop bar.

The boomerang-shaped hotel, designed by SB Architects of San Francisco, would feature a gold-hued section with horizontal window panels, and a silver-gray wing with vertical windows, according to renderings. The corners would be rounded, in a nod to the Streamline Moderne style of architecture.

South San Francisco’s Design Review Board has called the proposed hotel “the best design of a hotel the city has seen in many years.”

Ensemble awaits approval for a plan to monitor methane and volatile organic compounds at the site, which sits atop a former Oyster Point landfill closed a half century ago, according to its development agreement.

Also, the company must pay $250,000 to the city for a new sewer pump station.

SB Architects expects the project would be approved this year, with Ensemble to request a building permit to start construction by the end of next year, according to a June report.

Los Angeles-based Kilroy Realty is the master developer of Kilroy Oyster Point, a five-phase project approved in 2011 for redevelopment into a 3 million-square-foot life science campus on 50 acres.

Last fall, the firm finished construction of a 235,000-square-foot building at its Oyster Point development, which is fully leased to Cytokinetics.

— Dana Bartholomew