Centennial Campus hotel construction gets underway Wednesday

More than 30 years after N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus was born, officials will break ground Wednesday on a key component that has been envisioned from the beginning: A hotel and conference center.

When it opens sometime next summer, the StateView hotel will have 164 rooms, 9,000 square feet of meeting space, an outdoor pool and a restaurant and bar. It will be part of the Marriott Autograph Collection, a group of independent hotels affiliated with the chain.

That idea, launched on 1,120 acres of undeveloped state land south of the main campus in the mid-1980s, was to create a place that would attract research-oriented companies that would work with N.C. State’s faculty and students. Today, about 2,950 people work on campus for agencies and companies like LexisNexis, ABB and Bandwith, in addition to 3,400 NCSU students and 1,350 staff.

For years, Centennial Campus had the feel of a business park, mostly deserted except from 9 to 5 on weekdays.

But the hotel and conference center is part of a shift at Centennial as it becomes a place that’s active nearly around the clock. The completion of the James B. Hunt Jr. Library and construction of housing both for students and non-students now keep things active on nights and weekends.

About 1,000 students now live on campus in a student-housing complex called Wolf Ridge, while another 292 apartments in a development called The Greens have filled with non-students. And White Oak Properties will soon begin building new town homes and condominiums to restart the North Shore project, which stalled in 2006 after 33 town homes were completed.

Developer Roland Gammon hopes to have the first of 47 new North Shore town homes finished within six months, to be followed by two condo buildings with 32 units each. He said interest in the planned homes has been strong, mostly from people with ties to NCSU or Centennial Campus, but he thinks the campus also will appeal to people who want to be close to downtown without paying downtown prices.

“I think we’re very much a downtown property,” Gammon said. “We’re in sight of the skyline, and we’re easily $100,000 cheaper than downtown property.”

Another move toward creating a community at Centennial Campus is a planned “town center,” where a half million square feet of retail, offices and apartments would be built on 15 acres overlooking Lake Raleigh. The university hopes that by the end of this year it will begin looking for a developer to help define what that town center will look like, Harwood said.

“We think that the hotel needs to be coming out of the ground, so that the town center is poised for success,” he said. “We think there’s a symbiotic relationship between the town center and the hotel.”

StateView will be the university’s second attempt to get a hotel built at Centennial Campus. In 2003, it scrapped plans for a 250-room complex after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Middle East wars put a damper on travel and some lodging interests objected to what they considered unfair competition.

“This is going to be privately built, privately owned, privately financed and privately managed,” Harwood said.

Another change, he said, is that the demand from both the university and businesses to host out-of-town guests on Centennial has grown along with the campus. Since 2010, the amount of space on campus has increased 65 percent, to about 4 million square feet, Harwood said. The university has approval to build as many as 9 million square feet.

This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 7:28 PM with the headline "Centennial Campus hotel construction gets underway Wednesday."