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The Eugene-based Obie Companies are expanding their hotel and residence properties to Corvallis. The Gordon Hotel and Residences are due to open in the summer of 2027.
Brian Obie loves hotels.
And that includes the guests who stay in the hotels that Obie, the president and CEO of the Eugene-based Obie Companies, has developed in Eugene and Boise, Idaho.
“I mean, I see them every day in the elevator,” he said. “And so we get a lot of good feelings about what’s happening in people’s lives and adding joy to their lives. I didn’t even realize how much of an opportunity that was” until he developed his first hotel, Eugene’s Inn at the 5th, in 2012.
“That’s what propelled me to keep going, keep going — it’s meaningful, meaningful work, and our team feels that way,” he said.
And that’s what brought Obie and members of his team to downtown Corvallis the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 6, for the opening of The Gordon Hotel and Residences Discovery Center.
The showroom is meant to provide a sneak peek of the project, a 75-room boutique hotel combined with 92 high-end residences perched on the Willamette riverfront. It’s under construction about a block away from the center.
Thursday, more than 100 attendees packed the center to examine floor plans and full-scale mockups of a hotel room and furnished versions of a living room, a kitchen and a dining area from the residential side of the project.
Guests milled about alongside a waist-high robot with gifts — Gordon stickers and luggage tags — stashed into a top compartment.
In a brief interview, Obie said Corvallis was a logical choice for the company’s latest project, which follows the Gordon Hotel and Gordon Lofts in Eugene. (Gordon was the name of Obie’s father.)
Obie said after opening the Inn at the 5th, he worked with a University of Oregon marketing class to identify communities that, based on key attributes, seemed like good bets for similar hotels. The attributes included “proximity to a university” and “a certain amount of industry and population,” he said.
One of the top recommendations from the class: Boise.
Corvallis, home of Oregon State University, shares some of the attributes that made developing a hotel in Boise attractive, Obie said.
And the case for Corvallis got a boost from a major OSU booster, Obie recalled: At a dinner with Patricia Reser, “she pounded the table all night long,” saying the city needed another hotel. (The Reser name is on both OSU’s Reser Stadium and the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts.)
Obie liked Corvallis’ downtown, with its riverfront access and proximity to downtown stores, farmers markets, museums and restaurants. The block where the project is being built formerly housed Flat Trail Brewing and the warehouse for Blackledge Furniture. Construction of the hotel and residences will incorporate brick and wood from those structures, according to a news release.
Obie expects the hotel to draw well among people attending sports games and other events at OSU.
The residences are geared primarily to people over 40 with “medium to higher income,” he said, noting some of the estimated 20,000 people who commute to Corvallis for work might want to settle down closer to their jobs.
The apartments will feature a club room with a community kitchen, an outdoor terrace with a fire pit and grilling station, a fitness studio, bicycle storage, a pet-wash station and resident parking.
Obie said the Corvallis project draws from the companies’ experiences in other communities.
“You know, we weren’t (originally) in the hotel business, but we learned,” he said.
“You learn a lot about it. But with us, it’s all about the guests. It’s all about that experience.”
The project is scheduled to open in the summer of 2027.
