Fairmont New Orleans at 1010 Common

Fairmont is returning to New Orleans in a 1971 tower that spent years looking for a use. Kailas Companies is converting the former Bank of New Orleans Building, 31 stories and 780,000 square feet on the National Register, into a mixed-use property anchored by a 250-room Fairmont hotel. Accor confirmed in June that the first guests arrive November 13, 2026.

Project Scope

The hotel takes 18 of the building’s 31 floors: 250 keys including 40 suites, two restaurants, three bars and lounges, a bar on the 31st floor, a rooftop pool deck facing the Mississippi, a 10,000-square-foot spa and a 24-hour fitness studio. The balance of the roughly $90 million redevelopment delivers about 100,000 square feet of Class A office and rebuilt ground-floor retail. An Element hotel opened as the first phase.

Rozas Ward Architects is architect of record, Rockwell Group handled interiors, and Patel Construction is the general contractor. Monarch Private Capital came in as the historic tax credit equity investor, which is what makes the numbers work on a building of this vintage and size.

Why It Matters

A 780,000-square-foot 1971 office tower is one of the least financeable assets in American real estate right now. Floor plates are deep, the curtain wall is original, and the New Orleans central business district has no appetite for that much office space at any price.

Splitting it, hotel on 18 floors and office on a slice with retail at grade, is how these buildings get solved when a single-use conversion doesn’t pencil. Hotel keys tolerate deep floor plates better than apartments do, because a double-loaded corridor with rooms on both sides is the normal hotel section anyway. That’s the technical reason hospitality conversions keep beating residential conversions on 1960s and 1970s towers with big plates.

The tax credit stack is the other half. Federal and state historic credits on a National Register building are worth enough to close a gap private equity alone wouldn’t. Any operator looking at similar inventory in Houston, Dallas or Atlanta should run the historic-listing question first and the use question second.

Project Team & Details