A new six-story hotel is coming to a rapidly changing part of South End

A new six-story Marriott Aloft hotel will open in South End close to the light rail and next to Nadeau furniture store.

The 105,000-square-foot hotel will have 137 rooms once it’s complete. Its exact address is 3042 South Boulevard.

The group behind the project is HMS Management. Based in Richburg, South Carolina, HMS specializes in retail and hotel development. The firm, for instance, recently opened a Holiday Inn Express in Richburg.

The group liked the spot where the Aloft is going in because the area around it is rapidly developing, and because it’s walkable to popular restaurants and breweries, says Bhavin Patel, HMS’s vice president of management.

Nearby, for instance, the Bradham apartment complex recently opened at the old Pepsi bottling site near the New Bern Station. It’s across from Suffolk Punch and includes new tenants like Link & Pin and Eight+Sand Kitchen.

On top of that, the new Aloft fills a void, Patel says. The only other hotel in South End is the Holiday Inn Express on South Tryon that recently opened.

The Aloft’s location is close enough to Uptown that it’s easily accessible by light rail, Patel says, but South End is also booming with new corporate offices. A few either underway or recently opened include Dimensional Fund Advisors, Lowe’s, and LendingTree.

“This will be an attraction for the millennial crowd,” Patel says.

Here are a few details about the hotel, which is expected to open sometime in the first quarter of 2022:

• Its  building will also include almost 11,000 square feet of ground-level retail divided up into thee spaces. One will be one large enough for a sit-down restaurant, Patel says.
• The hotel will have two levels of parking — one at the ground level and one underground
• Its fitness center and concierge will be on the top floor, which has skyline views
• The hotel will have two spacious outdoor terraces, both with fire pits and one with a large projector
• It’ll have an Aloft-branded WXYZ indoor-outdoor bar, too, with space for live bands to play
• The project is in its design stage, and construction will begin later this year.

“We’re making this very modern,” Patel says. “It’s a custom-built property. The public spaces — such as the bar area and lounge — will be very open.”