Cavalier project wraps up with opening of Embassy Suites

VIRGINIA BEACH — Three hotels, 589 rooms, seven restaurants, nine bars, five pools and 900 employees sum up the vision nine years in the making.

The Cavalier Resort, a $435 million public-private partnership, is finally complete with the opening Thursday of the Embassy Suites by Hilton.

“We still have some kinks to work out,” developer Bruce Thompson, CEO of Gold Key|PHR, a Virginia Beach-based hospitality company, said Thursday morning.

It will be a soft opening for now. Contractors are finishing some of the details outside the 12-story building, including Tacos ‘N Tequila — a walk-up taco bar — and the bulk of the vegetation around the pool, which will go in this spring.

A 600-foot beachfront path winds along the length of the property from the Embassy Suites past the Cavalier Beach Club to the Marriott Virginia Beach Oceanfront. At night, lights illuminate the palm trees.

“The way the music and the lights and the landscaping all tie it together, it’s special,” Thompson said. “This truly is a real resort.”

Thompson will provide an update on the project Tuesday to the City Council.

In 2013, Cavalier Associates, an investment firm headed up by Thompson, bought the historic Cavalier Hotel on the hill and its related Oceanfront property for $35 million.

The city provided the company $18 million in an effort to save the 1927 landmark from demolition, which included the city’s purchase of public easements on the lawn and hotel entrance to protect it from development.

In 2017, the projects received $6.5 million from a state financing program, wherein the city and the state give back a portion of the sales tax generated by the project toward the debt.

It took five years and $80 million to renovate the deteriorating hotel, which reopened in 2018. To help fund the renovations, the developers built 81 homes around it and 35 condominiums across the street.

While the Cavalier was undergoing renovations, Thompson said he wanted to recreate the iconic “grand lawn” that once stretched from the historic hotel to the Cavalier Beach Club across the street.

That vision became a reality when the city allowed the closure of a portion of Atlantic Avenue and a new traffic signal at 40th Street.

“When you stand up on that hill, you still get that vista all the way across,” he said.

The Cavalier Beach Club opened in 2018, and the Marriott in 2020.

All three of the hotels are interconnected not only with guests being able to charge services from all three hotels to their rooms, but also in their decor.

The Embassy Suites gives a nod to the Cavalier’s history with its main restaurant, Fatty Arbuckle’s, named after the famous silent movie star who once stayed at the hotel. Artwork by Virginia Beach mixed media artist Kevin Moss celebrates the music performed at the original Cavalier Beach Club.

Room prices will top out at $200 a night in the winter to $500 a night on summer weekends.

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The final phase of the project will be upgrades to the public park adjacent to the Embassy Suites. Thompson plans to add trees and benches and replace a concrete fountain with art. A path for bicyclists to connect to Atlantic Avenue and the Boardwalk will remain, Thompson said.

He wants the city to install an additional traffic signal at 42nd Street and is willing to pay for it, he said.

Even though the biggest project of his career is wrapping up, Thompson’s not done.

He’s working on a development called The Farm on Dam Neck Road and plans to redevelop property his company owns on 25th Street in the future. He’s also interested in helping build a park at Rudee Loop.

And that’s just in Virginia Beach.

“We’ve got a few things we’re working on,” he said.

Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com

9 years in the making, Cavalier project wraps up with opening of Embassy Suites in Virginia Beach

Inside Business