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SAN DIEGO-Attendees at the ULI Spring event at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront last month had the opportunity to view the newly renovated pool deck and event courtyard at the hotel. Renovations resulted from the efforts of design firm JCJ Architecture and landscape architect Lifescapes, which completed work in April on the roughly decade-old hotel in less than a year for $4.3 million.

“It was a beautiful location for a pool deck, but nobody was using it,” Lalaine Tanaka, design principal at JCJ Architecture, tells GlobeSt.com. “It was a pretty barren pool deck. The hotel is a very white, large structure, and up against the [bay] there was a lot of glare going on. With all this white concrete, it was difficult to stay out there for a long period of time without getting all that glare in your eyes.”

The team designed the west-side pool deck to be an enhanced amenity for guests, so they would stay there longer, says Tanaka. They also worked to transform an underutilized outdoor area on another side of the hotel into an extension of the hotel's meeting spaces. “People can now host cocktail parties there, have weddings and additional events they were otherwise unable to do.”

The team also expanded the fitness room that juts out onto the pool-deck area, and is currently renovating the ballroom areas of the hotel. “Everything on the exterior side has been complete,” says Tanaka. “Now, we're doing the interior spaces of the ballroom.”

Added to the west side of the pool area was an inviting lounge bar. The team added cabanas, soft furnishings in warmer colors to minimize the glare, fire pits and a fireplace in order to turn the space into a “cool lounge bar,” says Tanaka. “The guests are actually staying longer in the pool deck and using the lounge bar, which becomes a focal point in addition to the pool.”

Guests now utilize the space in the evenings; it used to be deserted at that time of day. “One of the major goals for these spaces was to create flexibility and interchangeability of the space,” says Tanaka. “Those two spaces, the event area and pool area, are now very flexible. We've heard from the hotel's general manager that they have been completely booked on event spaces ever since opening them in April.”

As GlobeSt.com reported earlier this month, more than half of all outstanding debt held by hotel REITs—52%, in fact, just north of $16 billion—is set to come due between 2014 and 2016, according to Charlottesville, VA-based SNL Research. The company reports that the remainder of the year in terms of maturities is but a drop in the bucket, weighing in at less than $190 million, only 1.1% of the total. “But debt maturities are currently set to ramp up steadily over the next few years,” says the firm's Agha Nawazish Ali Khan. The overall number rises to 14.2% next year.

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