Hotel on Sand Hill Road: Stanford negotiating with unnamed hotelier Hotel on Sand Hill Road: Stanford negotiating with unnamed hotelier (March 09, 2005)

By Don Kazak

Palo Alto Weekly

The Stanford Management Co. is close to signing a deal to build a luxury hotel on a 21-acre parcel of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road next to I-280 in Menlo Park.

Bill Phillips, managing director of real estate for the Stanford Management Co., declined to name the hotel company negotiating for the parcel.

"It's still far enough away that it could collapse," Mr. Phillips said.

He added that a formal announcement should materialize within a month.

Stanford has long wanted to build a hotel on the site. Westin Hotels and Resorts was primed to build a hotel there in the late 1980s, but that deal fell apart.

In the past 18 months, Stanford actively sought a hotel company for the site. One year ago, Mr. Phillips denied rumors that Hyatt would abandon its Palo Alto location and build a new hotel on the Sand Hill Road site.

"Hyatt never contacted us," Mr. Phillips said. "This isn't Hyatt, it isn't Four Seasons, and it isn't Ritz Carleton."

Stanford officials also denied a rumor that Le Meridien, a European-based luxury hotel chain, was negotiating with the university.

David Johnson, Menlo Park's business development manager, said he and other city officials had been in talks with Stanford for some time about different possibilities for building a hotel on the land, including hotel-office and hotel-residential development.

They also discussed different types of hotels, including luxury and mid-range.

Last year, Menlo Park City Manager David Boesch said he'd be happy to speak with hotel officials about bringing a hotel to the site because of the potential for added tax revenue.

But City Councilman Andy Cohen said the project could cause traffic troubles on Sand Hill Road, particularly if an office building is constructed along with a hotel.

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