Former club eyes new clientele

RENDERING COURTESY THE DEANINN DEMAND: A former adult-entertainment venue on Fountain Street is set to become Providence’s newest boutique hotel.
RENDERING COURTESY THE DEAN INN DEMAND: A former adult-entertainment venue on Fountain Street is set to become Providence’s newest boutique hotel.

Ari Heckman, principal in Providence’s newest hotel, The Dean, finds the label “boutique hotel,” too limiting for the lodgings being fashioned by his group out of the old Sportsman’s Inn strip club on Fountain Street.
“I don’t like boutique hotel because it sounds like a specific thing,” Heckman said. “Our hypothesis is we are trying to create something that doesn’t exist. This will be something paradoxically high-concept but immediate. The Dean is something for everyone.”
Heckman and three other partners bought the 101-year-old former church shelter-come-gentlemen’s club 18 months ago and since then have been transforming it into an idiosyncratic, design-oriented, small-room hotel.
They’ve removed the stripper poles, plenty of old carpet, linoleum and wall mirrors, replacing them with locally made furnishings that include linens from Matouk in Fall River and bed frames from Nate Nadeau, an artist affiliated with Providence’s Steel Yard.
When The Dean opens this fall, Heckman believes it will attract a clientele that either doesn’t stay in Providence now, couch surfs or rents through websites such as AirBnB.
Although room prices for the Dean haven’t been set, Heckman said they will be lower than anything else currently offered in the city, drawing people who couldn’t normally afford a high-end hotel room.
“We think this will have induced demand,” Heckman said. “It would be an amazing feat to attract people to stay in Providence who wouldn’t otherwise and there is a whole groups of travelers who are attracted to cool hotels.”
Across Rhode Island, hospitality-industry leaders who market their destinations to tourists are hoping Heckman and partners are right. In South County and Newport, as well as Providence, tourism promoters are touting new boutique hotels to travel writers and featuring them in pitches for their communities.
“The variety of product we can offer travelers is important and The Dean brings something different,” said Kristen Adamo, vice president for marketing and communications at the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau. “It is a boutique hotel like the Hotel Providence, but I believe the price point will be lower and the focus will be more about convenience and flexibility.”
“When we work with national media, they are always asking what is new and different,” she added, “and this fits a story we can tell that includes the Providence G, Arcade and new shops in the Biltmore Garage.”
On the ocean, Lark Hotels last year opened the renovated The Attwater on Liberty Street in Newport and is preparing to open The Break on Ocean Road in Narragansett next spring.
At a conference she was attending in Louisiana, Myrna George, president and CEO of the South County Tourism Council, said she would definitely mention the new boutique hotel with travel writers.
“It is always to any region’s advantage to have a wide array of offerings and I am delighted that they will be here,” George said about the Breaks.
In North Kingstown, Hotel Providence owner Stanley Weiss has plans to turn the former Wickford Elementary School into an upscale boutique hotel with 30 to 40 rooms and a conference center.
A Providence native, Heckman first formed the idea to open a small, inexpensive hotel in the city while working for Cornish Associates around 2005. At the time he didn’t have the money to make it happen, but moved to New York where he worked in real estate private equity and then co-founded ASH NYC, a real estate investment and interior-design company. Before getting involved in The Dean, ASH purchased and redeveloped a multifamily building in Olneyville. In addition to two other partners from New York, Heckman is joined in The Dean ownership group by Clay Rockefeller, co-founder of the Steel Yard.
The Dean will have 52 rooms and Heckman said none of them will be exactly the same.
Including the $1.6 million sale price, the entire project is expected to cost about $6.5 million.
While The Dean design aesthetic will share little with the Sportsman’s Inn, Heckman said the small-room layout of the prior business actually translated perfectly to the new hotel and will be kept mostly intact.
Rooms at The Dean will range from about 150 square feet to 300 square feet and employ a variety of sleeping arrangements, from bunk beds, double beds and king-size beds. The fifth floor has four rooms that can be rented out as a unit to a wedding group or other large party.
Before it became a strip club and transient hotel, the 1912 brick building at 122 Fountain Street was a church shelter and Heckman said a major aspect of the renovation project has involved stripping away Sportsman’s Inn’s décor to reveal original details.
“The details are all over the place,” Heckman said.
Most of that unwanted covering has been disposed of, but one symbol of the old Sportsman’s Inn days remains: the dancers’ poles, which Heckman said remain in storage.
“We … haven’t figured out what to do with them,” Heckman said. •

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