The 10-story, 156,000-sq-ft Thompson Buckhead Hotel brought a new level of luxury to one of Atlanta’s most desirable neighborhoods, with 201 guest rooms and an exclusive members-only club with rooftop pool and bar. Contractor Brasfield & Gorrie had to navigate the constraints of a small, triangular site with close proximity to neighbors on a busy street to deliver the boutique hotel with a strong contextual architecture.

The tight site left only sidewalks and porte-cochere for storing materials, and required all deliveries to be precisely scheduled and to arrive on time, including floor-by-floor deliveries and some rebar pretied offsite.

Judges called the hotel a beautiful building with well-executed interiors and exteriors, all on a challenging site that led to difficulties with getting deliveries in and out along the busy corridor.

“Everything about it is just really nice,” said one judge. “I thought for such a large project they did some really cool stuff with the concrete. I wouldn’t have expected that for a project like this.”

The design team was tasked with a luxury boutique hotel in a prime location of Buckhead Village. By working with a neighboring development for parking, the hotel was freed from the constraints of the massive, regularized footprint of a parking structure.

The building form is therefore able to respond to bends in the street grid and maximize views of the Buckhead and Atlanta skylines. Drone flights at various proposed building heights provided the ownership group a sense of the views from each floor and helped to define the overall height of the structure.

A street-level restaurant and dining porch activates the site’s most prominent corner, while the hotel’s ballroom spills out onto a contemporary garden for an intimate indoor/outdoor experience. The rooftop features a private club and terrace, and each guest room features imported wood flooring and uninterrupted glass exterior walls.

Completed in November 2021, crews broke ground on the $53-million project in March 2020, leaving the project team to navigate the onset of COVID-19 restrictions, challenges and uncertainty. The project was able to implement dozens of new safety measures and continue on schedule.