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Accommodations await
Hotels spruce up, expand to meet growing demand of business clients
by David Armstrong

Personality Hotels of Union Square, which helped jump-start San Francisco's thriving boutique hotels when it was founded in 1982, is eyeing expansion, according to President and CEO Yvonne Lembi-Detert.

The company survived the hotel and tourism downturn without losing any properties, Lembi-Detert said. With five hotels in central San Francisco, about 500 rooms in total, privately held Personality plans to renovate all its holdings. The lobby at its Hotel Union Square is being remodeled, she said, and suites at the extended-stay Steinhart Hotel are being redone two at a time.

The company also plans to break ground at 80 Ellis St. by late 2007 for a new hotel called M-31, "The name of the largest star in the galaxy,'' Lembi-Detert said. The company will need financing for the new property, which is one of the reasons she hired new CEO Stephen Algood this month, she said.

"It will be the first for us to build from scratch,'' she said.

M-31 would also require city permits to fulfill Lembi-Detert's plan to build it with retail operations on the ground floor and open some of the property to privately owned condos.

In the meantime, the company is showcasing the historical qualities of its renovated central city hotels, redoing a suite in the Union Square Hotel in the 1930s Dashiell Hammett style to honor the late San Francisco author.

Personality is also seeking management contracts to run hotels under the M-31 and Diva brands elsewhere. Los Angeles and Seattle are the most likely possibilities, Lembi-Detert said.

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