Location: Dunedin, FL

Description: The Fenway Hotel is a historic “Jazz Age” Hotel located in Dunedin, FL. Originally planned and designed in 1924, the building was operated as a hotel in its heyday. After its life as hotel the building was used as Trinity College from 1961to 1988 and then was used by Schiller International University from 1991until 2005. On June 13, 2014, the non-profit Taoist Tai Chi Society purchased the hotel for it to become its new national headquarters and international center for its parent society. The Tai Chi Society later revised the plans on how much space they would need to occupy and decided the hotel could be used as a public hotel under the Marriott International Autograph Collection brand, thus preserving the building mainly as a hotel.

Raynor Scope of Work: Raynor’s contract scope of work consisted of the drywall and stucco renovation of the 56,340 SF hotel, ballroom, rooftop bar, pool area and porte-cochere. This renovation took a little over 3 years to complete due to ownership and use changes to the plans. About 40% of the interior drywall scope of work was performed in-house and 60% performed by one of our subcontractors, Progress Drywall. 100% of the exterior stucco renovation and new porte-cochere was performed in-house.

Being an almost 100-year-old building, The Fenway Hotel presented many challenges for Raynor and the General Contractor, Nelson Construction. A lot of the original framing was not able to be used due to rot and decay and this presented a quality control issue of aligning the new timbers with the old timbers that remained because they were a little thicker than the newer timbers. Raynor did this by working closely with the framing contractor and the GC to align each wall with special care with use of lasers to identify timbers that would throw the wall out of plane. The design had to change many times, as well, trying to bring a 100-year-old building up to the current Florida Building Code, including the elevator shaft and chases between floors, the separation between the new hotel rooms and the separation at the perimeter between floors. Raynor worked hand in hand with the GC and the Architects project manager to provide assistance in sourcing these UL ratings. Some of these ratings would have pushed the project over budget, so it wasn’t just coming up with a rating, but value engineering those ratings to get the required assembly in line with the budget provided. The stucco on the exterior of the building had a specific texture that had to be matched, so Raynor had to use our most experienced craftsmen to achieve the desired look. This makes for less productive work, using plasterers as atst instead of their normal production mode. All in all, the challenges were overcome to recreate this gem of a building.

Awards: 2019 General Commercial Project over $1,000,000.00 (Florida Wall and Ceiling Contractors Association)