Pamela Baldwin is building Hotel Providence.
As construction workers connect three buildings on the corner of Matthewson and Westminster streets to build the hotel, Baldwin is creating the flavor for the city’s first European-style boutique hotel.
“We are hoping to make this the most sought after hotel in the city by making it the most inviting, friendliest place. It’s going to be upscale but non-pretentious, so that everyone feels so welcome here that they wouldn’t want to go anywhere else,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin was appointed general manager under the hotel operator, the Dunfey Hotel Group Providence LLC, and started working for the hotel last October – an early start for a hotel that isn’t opening until October.
With a team of two employees, Baldwin oversees daily operations of the hotel. She manages the budget, the accounting control systems and operating policies and procedures.
She decides which flatware will be used in the hotel, the types of towels, the thread count of the linens and the televisions for each room. She orders the housekeeping supplies, creates the employee handbooks and decides how guests should be greeted. She sifts through hundreds of letterhead samples and chooses which one to use on the stationery. She samples the shampoos, soaps, lotions and bottled waters and chooses which kind to keep in each room, because the little details really do matter, she said.
“I think about the hotel all the time. When I’m on my way home, I’m on the phone with someone talking about it, and when I’m home I’m reading trade magazines. I put in some hours on weekends. When the hotel opens, the hours will be longer,” she said. “I love it though, I love servicing, and you have to in order to do something like this, or else you burn out.”
Though Baldwin has a huge responsibility, she seems to take it in stride because, given her track record, she makes the right decisions.
She served as general manager for two other boutique hotels on the West Coast, opening both properties. Most recently, she served at Ibis Consulting Inc., as vice president of finance and administration, building the company’s brand and customer base when it relocated to Providence in 1996. She left the position in 2001 and worked there again for a short time before taking on the general manager position for Hotel Providence last year.
Though her track record shows a successful career in hotel management, the Massachusetts native didn’t have an ounce of hotel management training when she started in the industry.
“I was an event planner, so I had a lot of experience with public relations. I talked to a property owner who needed a general manager for a property and they asked me if I wanted to do it,” she said. “I really had no idea what I was doing when I started, but I had done so much event planning and had public relations experience, I felt confident.”
She helped open the Marina Inn and the Hotel Louise (now the White Swan) in San Francisco, and learned the business side of running a hotel from friends in the business. She learned to create the hotel budget and accounting control systems, and occupancy rates nearly doubled through improvements to guest services, developing corporate accounts and a new marketing plan.
Baldwin moved back to her hometown of Hopedale, Mass., in 1987 and took a position as an accounting controller before taking the vice president position at Ibis.
The mother of two girls wanted to run a hotel again, but was waiting until her daughters, now 11 and 13 years old, were old enough for her to take on another all-encompassing career, she said.
The only employees of Hotel Providence hired so far are a catering director, who also works with the restaurant slated for the hotel, L’Epicureo, and a sales director who is already working to attract potential customers.
Hotel Providence is targeting the same consumers many of the other hotels in the city try to attract: businesspeople who stay in Providence during the week; though Baldwin said the hotels in the city “don’t really compete with each other because each one is different.”
Being different from the Biltmore, The Westin and other upscale hotels in the city is the selling point for Hotel Providence – “the exciting alternative for business and leisure travelers in the city” – and the pitch seems to be working.
Blocks of rooms are already reserved and events are already booked, Baldwin said.
“When you go to a chain hotel, whether you’re in Providence or Boston, they look pretty much the same,” she said. “Boutique hotels have a different feel – very focused on service.”
The hotel is considered a boutique because there will be fewer than 100 rooms and it is independently owned. The 80 guest rooms and suites will have the same color schemes and style, though each room will be set up differently because the three buildings are constructed differently.
The Westminster Street building was built as the Westminster Hotel in 1882, and changed names and purposes a number of times until Johnson & Wales University took it over in the early 1980s.
The Lederer Building was built as a professional office building in 1895 and part of it was used as the Cherry & Webb department store in the mid-1900s until it fell into disrepair.
Stanley Weiss, the Providence developer responsible for building Hotel Providence, built the third building, called the Liner Building, in 1994. In 1997, Weiss gave Johnson & Wales one of his buildings on Weybosset Street in exchange for the Westminster Hotel building, now being used for the Hotel Providence.
Architects and interior design firm DiLeonardo International, based in Warwick, united the two brick Federal-style buildings and the contemporary Liner Building on April 16 to integrate the three. The design firm is in charge of all interior design aspects as well.
The hotel will have a 2,200-square-foot Tilden Thurber Ballroom and three additional conference rooms – the Brown University Boardroom, The Rhode Island School of Design Room, and the Johnson & Wales University Room. All function spaces and rooms will be set up with wireless (Wi-Fi) high-speed Internet access to Internet-based conferencing capabilities and sound.
Developer Weiss partnered with L’Epicureo Ristorante in 2003 after learning the owners wanted to relocate.
The restaurant, named one of the top five restaurants in Providence by Bon Appetit magazine in 2002 and commended by many others, is going to be located at the hotel and all the hotel events will be catered by the restaurant, set to open just before the hotel this September.
When the hotel at 311 Westminster St. and the corner of Matthewson Street opens this October, room rates will be between $109 and $199.
The first model room is set for completion in just over a month.
