Westin Hotel, Quintiles HQ coming to Imperial Center

Some big news in today's N&O and Herald-Sun -- local developer Tri Properties has signed on to build a ten-story headquarters for Quintiles down at Imperial Center, uniting their operations that are currently scattered throughout Durham and RTP. The development plan also includes an eight-story Westin Hotel.

I'm glad to hear of both of these pieces of news, but I'm especially intrigued at Durham adding a Westin on its southern end. Westin fits a useful niche between your full-service business hotels (Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, etc.) and your true luxury and boutique facilities. Durham has the former in abundance, particularly in RTP-land, and between the WaDuke and the future Greenfire property downtown, will have some representation on the upper-end, too. But Westin is a good brand to draw in to the RTP area, filling a geographic gap in this genre of hotel between Chapel Hill and Cary.

All the better, the new Westin keeps tourist and visitor dollars in Durham County. No matter how close the Westin is to Wake County, sorry gang, this one's in Durham -- both city and county, I believe.

I'll be interested to see what the final naming decision on the hotel is. One can only trust that Tri Properties will find a way to work Durham into the name: if it ends up the Westin Research Triangle, the Westin Raleigh-Durham or, God help us, the Westin Raleigh West, we'll need to put the good folks at the Convention and Visitors Bureau away from any semi-automatic weapons.

Comments

[hotel name]

The N&O said it would be called Westin Hotel RTP

[Reyn Bowman]

Durham at Research Triangle Park has a nice ring and its accurate too:)

[Matt]

Accuracy schmaccuracy!

[Michael Bacon]

Well, given that I'm on record in the whole Taste of Durham hullabaloo as pointing to the Imperial Center and saying, "That's not Durham!" I'm not going to object to this too much. I do think, as far as economics and tax base go, this is a good thing. And yes, if they'd said Raleigh West, I'd have been upset.

Here's a possible compromise: can we come up with a decent name for that disembodied strip of the city over on the east side of the park? This would all be easier, of course, if every commercial establishment in the area weren't doing its best pretending to be part of RTP. Bethesda isn't a bad name for the northern portion, around the eponymous elementary school, but something for that whole chunk would be good. Somehow calling the area "Miami" seems pretty silly, but i is basically defined as the S. Miami Blvd. corridor.

Does anyone actually know where the name Miami Blvd. came from?

[Moncler Jacka]

I just sent this post to a bunch of my friends as I agree with most of what you’re saying here and the way you’ve presented it is awesome.