Madison’s Urban Design Commission has granted final approval — provided the developer makes a few last tweaks — to the planned overhaul of the Downtown block that has been home for decades to the Hotel Ruby Marie, the Essen Haus German restaurant and the Come Back In bar.
The unanimous vote Wednesday evening came after the project’s eight-story, 178-unit apartment building and six-story, 100-room hotel cleared the Landmarks Commission on May 20, Plan Commission on June 10 and City Council on June 19.
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The apartment building will consist partly of low-cost housing in accordance with a zoning change made last year that allows developers to build extra floors if they offer some of the additional units at lower rents.
It is at least the fourth redevelopment proposed since 2000 for the corner of South Blair and East Wilson streets, a site that is partly situated within the First Settlement Historic District and has proved tricky for developers to reimagine.
Developer JCap Real Estate of Eau Claire was the first to put forward a project divided into two separate structures: an apartment building on South Blair Street that is subject to the historic district’s stricter design standards and a hotel on East Wilson Street that is not.
JCap will demolish all of the buildings along the 500 block of East Wilson Street — and the parking lot behind them — except for the Hotel Ruby Marie, which was built in 1875 and renovated in 2000 and contains the Up North Bar. The developer will then rebuild the façades of the Come Back In and a smaller building at 518 E. Wilson St as part of the new hotel.
The latest renderings of the reconstructed façades show the Come Back In’s asymmetrical doors replaced with a pair of matching doors and awnings added to both storefronts, but it could undergo further changes as JCap and city staff work through the remaining details of the project.
“We felt it was important to keep the character of these façades intact,” Joel Koeppen of Kahler Slater, an architecture firm working with JCap on the project, told the Urban Design Commission on Wednesday.
The rest of the exteriors of the hotel and apartment building will be a combination of masonry and sheet metal, with stepbacks distancing pedestrians from the upper stories and some of the sheet metal.
A “living street” between the two buildings will include outdoor dining, open space, access to parking and an area for hotel drop-off.
The Urban Design Commission’s decision marks another key step forward for the project. The developer will still have to secure additional staff authorizations and permits before construction can begin.