Bellevue Avenue, home to several of Newport’s most famous mansion museums, may get a new addition lining its street: a three-story luxury hotel.
The 91-room luxury hotel is being proposed at the corner of Bellevue Gardens Shopping Center, which was purchased by the Procaccianti Group in 2023 for $40 million. The proposed three-story hotel is expected to take up much of what is currently a parking lot in front of the retail stores currently inhabiting the plaza, with the developers proposing a new road between the hotel and the rest of the shopping center parking lot to provide access to the stores and the hotel’s underground 169-space parking garage.
Renderings provided by the developers to the Technical Review Committee when they presented the project on May 31 show a building right at home with the mansion museums down the road, and that is by design. The facade is meant to resemble New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett’s Stone Villa, a Newport summer home that was demolished in 1957 to make way for the Bellevue shopping plaza. The developer’s presentation details a restaurant, an events garden, a spa and a club room all within the first floor.
The hotel’s interior totals 25,650 gross square feet, which does not include an additional 5,000 gross square feet for the exterior court.
The project has yet to file an official application with the city, as they just presented the idea to the Technical Review Committee. They are set to return to the TRC in July, having received several comments and notes from the staff-led advisory board.
The area is in the city’s General Business District, meaning hotels are allowed to be built there by right. This means the project will not need to go before the Zoning Board for any kind of special use permit. However, it will go before the board if it needs zoning relief, such as relief from lot coverage requirements. It is also within the city’s Historic District, which means it may have to go before the Historic District Commission to determine if the new hotel is compatible with the surrounding area in terms of size, scale and other factors.