Founded in 2010 by Ethan Orley and Phillip Welker off the heels of the Great Recession, Nashville-based development and management company Oliver Hospitality has built a portfolio of seven hotels—in the Southeast and California—and expects to double in size by 2027.
When the company launched, the cofounders were “young, budding hoteliers who didn’t know what we were doing, but we were fortunate enough to buy a 28-room hotel in Knoxville, TN, where Philip had gone to college,” said Orley, who, along with Welker, serves as managing director of the firm. “I was living in New York City at the time, and he suggested that we give it a go, not knowing the first thing about hotels, except that I traveled around the world and stayed in great hotels.”
That first property in Knoxville was The Oliver Hotel, and the company is back in the Tennessee city converting the Andrew Johnson Building, which opened in 1929 as the Andrew Johnson Hotel but became a school administration building, back into a hotel with a working title of Hotel Americana.
The Andrew Johnson Hotel had a rich history, with such notable figures as Amelia Earhart and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff staying at the property. Country music legend Hank Williams spent the last night of his life at the hotel.
“The county issued an RFP to have the building go private, and we won it because we said we were going to bring it back to its former glory as a hotel,” said Orley. “We convinced them that we were the right pick because we have many years of experience converting old buildings. We converted the Fairlane Hotel in Nashville from a 1970s mid-century office building and the Claremont Motor Hotel in Atlanta into the Hotel Claremont.”
While Oliver Hospitality now owns the building, it is still early in the development process and no timeline has been set for its opening.
Last October, the company opened the 156-room DoubleTree by Hilton Clarksville Riverview in Welker’s hometown of Clarksville, TN. The hotel is the anchor of Riverview Square, a mixed-use development the company is developing. For a long time, Orley noted, the district has been composed of strip malls off the highway,
“Philip always had his eyes on redeveloping the downtown core in Clarksville and bringing in some of that lifestyle excitement that you get in Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga,” said Orley. “The catalyst for our project was the building of a $200-million multisport, multipurpose stadium across the street from the old Riverview Inn, which is now the DoubleTree.”
He added, “We partnered with the city to build a 500-space parking deck next to the hotel, which freed up the parking lot in front of the hotel. We now have this great opportunity to build a 55,000-sq.-ft. retail-lifestyle mall between the hotel and the new stadium.”
The company is also developing a 124-room, upper-upscale boutique hotel in Orley’s hometown of Detroit and has several deals in the works for properties outside of Atlanta; in South Carolina near Augusta, GA; and on the west coast of Florida.
“We’re always trying to fill our pipeline on the development side,” said Orley. “As we all know, it’s challenging to capitalize deals today, so we’re always trying to find opportunities where we can elicit economic incentives and put together creative capital stacks. We’re also looking to garner interest for us to come in as third-party managers for properties that really work to our strengths.”
Those strengths, he said, include “bringing in a really strong design element, reenergizing the food and beverage concept and focusing on the desire to stand out from the crowd.”
When looking to the future of Oliver Hospitality, Orley said, “On the management side, in five years, we’d like to be managing a handful of other unique, boutique, independent hotels across the country, but with specific attention to the Southeast, and connecting with other like-minded owners who would like to work with a smaller but focused management company.”
On the development front, he noted, “Over the next several years, we would want to build two or three hotels a year—or acquire existing properties. We will want to pay special attention to our Oliver brand. Any boutique hotel that we develop that fits within our standards will be ‘by Oliver.’ Our Hotel Claremont, Fairlane Hotel, Station House Inn and Lodge at Marconi are all ‘by Oliver’ hotels.”
The company also wants to develop more Oliver hotels beyond the Knoxville and Oxford, MS, locations already in the portfolio.
“The properties will range from 75 to 125 keys with certain elements that align with our Southern hospitality personality,” said Orley. “We want to raise capital and do more of them specifically in secondary and tertiary markets, but also in some primary markets in the Southeast.”
