Boutique hotel planned near Cultural Trail on Virginia Avenue

A 26-room boutique hotel is being considered for a property along the Cultural Trail on Virginia Avenue. (Rendering by Blackline Studio/Courtesy of the city of Indianapolis)

The owner of a half-acre plat in the Fountain Fletcher District southeast of downtown Indianapolis is weighing whether to use the property for a boutique hotel.

Plans for the 26-room hotel at 1015 Virginia Ave. are still in the early stages, with the owner set to request feedback on its proposal during an Indianapolis Historic Preservation Commission meeting.

The commission will not cast a vote on the proposal at the meeting. That would come later on during a formal variance and construction approval meeting.

According to filings with the commission, the owner plans to spend about $6 million on the project.

The hotel project is tentatively named Idle, according to renderings. It would consist of two floors and a 21-space surface parking lot, as well as four parallel spaces along the northern property line.

The development would be built adjacent to the southeastern spoke of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which runs along Virginia Avenue. A large portion of the site falls under the preservation commission’s purview because of its location in the irregularly shaped Fountain Square historic area.

Stephen Poovey, a developer who has specialized in multifamily projects, owns the three-parcel property through a holding company, according to filings with the commission.

“I am super excited about the potential of this project,” said Poovey in an email to IBJ. He called Fountain Square his “favorite neighborhood in the city and is always where I stay when I visit.”

“The area is unique, vibrant, and reminds me of pockets of Portland when I lived there with my now-wife in the early 2010s,” he wrote.

The property, which is home to a small former automotive garage and several surface parking spaces, was home to Wildwood Market from late 2014 to early 2023. Before that, the property was home to a used car lot.

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Plans call for the hotel to feature a lower-level interior courtyard and a second-floor shared deck area, accessible from a mezzanine.

The lobby would feature a bar, a mix of indoor and outdoor dining spaces, and a check-in area. Most of the units would have their own private patio areas and there would be a shared outdoor “plunge pool.”

As proposed, the hotel would have an open-air design centered on a mix of mostly white and dark-red brick. It would also incorporate light-colored wood materials as an accent. The structure would also feature tall windows and rounded-off openings to patio areas.

The hotel rooms would range from 280 to 752 square feet each, with an average size of 383 square feet. The entirety of the building would be just under 13,500 square feet, about 1,400 of which would be for back-of-house and pool areas and another 2,117 square feet for lobby and mezzanine space.

Poovey is president of Indy Collective Property Group, or ICPG, a company  that manages units across central Indiana, largely in  restored historic structures,.

The group was formed in late 2023 following legal entanglements between Poovey and his former business partner, Christopher Piazza, related to the operation of Reverie Estates.

Reverie Estates gained notoriety in 2022 when tenants from 11 buildings that it managed formed the Reverie Tenants Union to protest poor maintenance and unsafe conditions at their apartments.

Poovey and Piazza reached a undisclosed settlement in a two-year dispute over Reverie Estates in 2023.

While Reverie is still listed as the deeded owner of the 1015 Virginia Avenue property through an eponymous limited-liability company, the commission’s documentation filed by a representative on the project lists Poovey as the property owner.

Poovey said the hotel project will be “wholly owned and operated by entities and partnerships completely separate from Reverie and/or ICPG, for one because this is hospitality, not property management.”

The architect on the project is Indianapolis-based Blackline Studio.

“The business plan here is to continue to work very closely with local people—right now with architects like Blackline as well as builders, but also investors and an operator—to build something that truly celebrates the neighborhood, even enhances its identity, and attracts people from the (growing) number of options they have downtown to something a little more offbeat, independent, unique, and cool,” Poovey said.