JW Marriott Downtown Phoenix

LaPour Partners plans to convert a vacant 19-story 1990s office tower at Arizona Center into a 340-room JW Marriott, the developer's second hotel on the downtown Phoenix complex after the AC Hotel it built there in 2021. The roughly $200 million adaptive-reuse project won't break ground until 2027 and isn't expected to open until 2029.

The place

The hotel occupies a 19-story tower within Arizona Center, the roughly one-million-square-foot mixed-use complex near 3rd and Van Buren streets in downtown Phoenix. The site sits about half a block from the Phoenix Convention Center, across the street from the 1,000-room Sheraton Phoenix Downtown, and within walking distance of the ASU Downtown campus, the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, Chase Field and Footprint Center.

The concept

The tower dates to the early 1990s, when it was built as office space, and has stood largely vacant for the past 10 to 15 years. Reliance Management, led by investor Daryl Burton, bought the Arizona Center site in 2023 for $27 million; Las Vegas-based LaPour Partners, the development firm founded by Jeff LaPour, is now converting the 351,600-square-foot office building into a 340-room JW Marriott in a roughly $200 million adaptive-reuse project — a genuine first-time hotel conversion for a building that never previously operated as a hotel. Its deep floor plates and 12.5-to-13-foot floor-to-floor heights, unusual for an office-to-hotel conversion, allow for guest rooms averaging more than 500 square feet. LaPour Partners already operates one hotel at Arizona Center: it developed the 199-room AC Hotel Phoenix Downtown there in a joint venture with NewcrestImage, which opened in 2021 and has since been sold to Arbor Lodging Properties. The JW Marriott is a separate, larger undertaking on the same complex, with a long runway ahead: interior demolition is targeted for early 2027, construction is set to follow later that year, and the hotel is not expected to open until 2029.

Dining & wellness

LaPour has said the hotel will include a spa, fitness center, a signature restaurant, and banquet and meeting facilities, plus a club lounge, though no operators, chefs or restaurant names have been announced. Ground-level plans call for a resort-style pool overlooking Arizona Center's park-like grotto, framed by outdoor dining and public space, and roughly 15,000 square feet of meeting and event space is planned for the tower's 18th and 19th floors. Beyond these broad strokes, the food-and-beverage program remains unconfirmed.