The hotel, at 1600 West End Ave., will occupy the first 14 floors of the 23-story building with the spa, health club and condos on the nine stories above. Besides office and retail-restaurant space, the 25-story building will had 18,000 sf of meeting space that includes a 10,750-sf ballroom. The two towers will be connected by a ground-level building that will hold a bar, shops and possibly four restaurants, Palmer's staff tells GlobeSt.com.

Developer Alex Palmer estimates the project will take two years to complete with the hotel component opening in late 2008 or first quarter 2009. The hotel would be the first luxury inn to open Downtown since the Hilton Nashville Downtown opened across from the Gaylord Entertainment Center in 2001. Of the planned InterContinental Nashville, Palmer says "there is not a hotel in Nashville now that will come close to this hotel" in the luxury column.

Palmer has planned West End Summit since he began acquiring Downtown parcels at Broadway, West End and 16th avenues seven years ago. On his deal with InterContinental, which closed April 21, Palmer says "there could have been a deal a long time ago, but I wanted an upper-end hotel." He says "there are a lot of entertainment people who come to Nashville and a lot of people who tend to come here on business."

Butch Spyridon, president of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau, says "there is plenty of demand" for a new Downtown luxury hotel. Downtown has a total 2,635 hotel rooms. The entire Davidson County has 32,982 rooms, according to the bureau. Those numbers compare with an estimated 132,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas and 116,000 rooms in Orlando, the two leading tourism and convention destinations in the US, according to industry sources.

InterContinental is financing a portion of West End Summit's development and will operate the hotel on a 20-year management contract with Palmer's company. The new hotel would be the 17th largest in Nashville, ranking behind the 289-room Millennium Maxwell House-Nashville at 2025 Metrocenter Blvd. and the 287-room Holiday Inn Express Downtown Nashville at 920 Broadway. Room prices haven't been determined.