The Westley Hotel, Tapestry Collection by Hilton

The Westley Hotel opened in Calgary's Eau Claire neighbourhood on July 6, 2021, converting a 40-year-old, five-storey office building — most recently Birchcliff Energy's head office — into a 104-room boutique property under Hilton's Tapestry Collection. Family-owned Silver Hotel Group, which bought the vacant building in 2018, describes it as Western Canada's first hotel of its kind built from a gutted office conversion, anchored by Fonda Fora, an in-house Mexican restaurant from local operator Thank You Hospitality.

The place

The Westley sits on 4th Avenue between 5th and 6th Street SW in Eau Claire, on the western edge of downtown Calgary, within walking distance of Prince's Island Park and the more than 1,000 km of pathway following the Bow River. The Core Shopping Centre and the Stephen Avenue dining strip are a few blocks south, putting the hotel closer to downtown's quieter, park-facing edge than to the office towers further east.

The concept

The Westley occupies a five-storey, 68,000-square-foot building that spent roughly 40 years as offices — most recently the head office of Birchcliff Energy — before family-run Silver Hotel Group bought it from Artis REIT in 2018 for between $9 million and $10 million. Rather than build new, which managing director Asheet Ruparell said would have forced a larger, harder-to-amortize tower on expensive downtown land, Silver gutted the building back to its structural core and elevator shafts and rebuilt from there, a process it started demolishing in late 2018 and finished construction on in 2021. Calgary-based FRANK Architecture handled the conversion, trading a 40-year-old office floor plate for 104 pet-friendly rooms across six categories, two meeting spaces, a sunlit fitness facility and an outdoor patio — described in local trade coverage as the first project of its kind, a boutique office-to-hotel conversion, in Western Canada. The name was chosen deliberately generic rather than tied to any specific historical reference, Ruparell said, as a distinct, ownable identity for what Silver pitched as an alternative to the market's older, "tired" downtown hotel stock — closer to the food-and-beverage-led boutique format the company had already run in Toronto than to a standard branded box.

Dining & wellness

Fonda Fora, the hotel's ground-floor restaurant, is a contemporary Mexican concept from local operator Thank You Hospitality (founder Cody Willis, also behind Native Tongues Taqueria and Calcutta Cricket Club in Calgary), led by Yucatan-raised chef Rafael Castillo and built around fresh seafood and seasonal, vegetable-forward plates. Its open kitchen connects directly to the hotel's lobby lounge, an intentional design choice meant to blur the line between restaurant and hotel arrival rather than route guests past a conventional front desk.