Thomson report

Things are happening in Prestige Hotel land as Joe K. Huber announces his new project for Sooke B.C. just 35 kilometers west of Victoria on the ocean.

It must have been five years ago that Joe and I sat down for lunch and I posed the question, “What is next for the B.C. hospitality group started by your father Joe Sr?” and he surprised me with the answer that it was time for the company to build a resort project and add it to the nine hotels the company already had built in the province in the Interior, the Kootenays and the Rockies in B.C. He wasn’t sure where but he wanted that to be his next project and he had some plans of what he wanted to do in putting the resort complex together.

This week he is officially announcing that a new Prestige property will be built in Sooke and he expects the shovels to be in the ground next month. The company has purchased ocean front property for the Prestige Oceanfront Resort and convention centre.

The design is a complete change for the company and takes one into a tropical plantation style building with distinct décor themes on each of the five floors. The views for guests will be of Sooke Basin, Sooke Harbour, and the Strait or Olympic Mountains. It is a very beautiful location and one that took awhile to assemble the three parcels of land for the construction of the resort.

Here is what Joe K. had to say about the undertaking for his hotel chain's new edition. “Since we completed the land deal, it has taken us almost a year to get all our architectural drawings and engineering complete and we are hoping to be in the ground in October so very quickly things will be underway. This resort is something like we have done before at this level but it will be a five star resort undertaking with a tropical element to it. The entire look of this building and the theme of it will be a tropical plantation feeling. It is something you would see in the deep south and it is sort of like an ageless, timeless historical structure. We will be building to look like it has been there for fifty or sixty years. That old style historical look we wanted for this structure, is what took so long to get these plans finished, with meeting after meeting of showing the architects pictures of what we wanted. It took a long time to get to it but once we had it of course we knew we finally had the look we wanted. It is four structures, a five story structural building with a gentle slope going down to the water. We are having a destination spa with an outside deck for oceanside massages etc. A full athletic club, we going to have two main restaurants and two smaller eateries, a complete convention centre for 400, and a large marina with the whale watching, fishing charters and then on the ocean front the landscaping will be such that people can have outdoor receptions, weddings, banquets and you can even have concerts. The room total will be 122. We expect to open in the fall of 2010.”

Joe Sr. started in the hospitality business in 1963 with a motel in Penticton. He moved to Kelowna in 1974 and bought the Okanagan Seasons motel in 1974. He added the Dilworth Motor Inn in 1980 and took over another motel on Gordon Drive and affiliated it with the Travelodge chain. Then it was the Kelowna Motor Inn, the Alpine Motor Inn and in 1985 the first of the Prestige Inn group with the building of the lakefront hotel in 1985. There are now nine Prestige Hotels. The company has hotels in Vernon, Salmon Arm, Radium Hot Springs, Cranbrook (2), Nelson (2) and Rossland. The Rossland property has just been completely renovated. The flagship location is in Kelowna.