Stanford's plans for a 165,000 square-foot luxury hotel on University-owned land on Sand Hill Road have gone to the Menlo Park City Council for initial approval. The hotel complex, located near the 280 freeway, will also include 100,000 square feet of office space.

The building will also include a restaurant, spa, fitness center and five extended-stay villas, in addition to 120 guest rooms, said Menlo Park Development Services Manager Justin Murphy in a city council staff report. The office space would be used primarily by “the venture capital community, attorneys, accountants — very similar to the business community on Sand Hill already,” said Bill Phillips, a spokesman for the Stanford Management Company, in an interview with The Daily.

Stanford officials first pitched the idea for the hotel to the Menlo Park City Council during a study session on May 24.

“All that’s happened so far is the study session, which precedes a formal application,” said David Boesch, the Menlo Park city manager. “It’s a concept plan that gives the city council a chance to ask initial questions.”

He added that the city expects Stanford to file a formal application within the next couple weeks.

“Upon receiving [the application], the Council will make an initial review of the scope of the work and initiate an environmental review,” Boesch said. “It’ll take about a year for all the environmental review to be compiled and the changes made.”

The plan seemed to be “favorably received by the council,” he said.

The 21-acre plot adjacent to Sand Hill Road and Interstate 280, where the hotel will be built, was previously marked as the site of a 350-room Westin in the late 1980s, but that project never came to fruition.

The current hotel complex would require several concessions from current Menlo Park regulations. For instance, the maximum legal building height is currently 30 feet and the new hotel would stand 35 feet tall, Murphy wrote in a report. The city would also have to rezone the land for hotel use.

The design of the hotel, should it be built, will pay homage to Sunset Magazine and the beauty of the American west.

“It’ll be a modernist approach to the classic ranch style — lots of windows, high ceilings, large eaves and overhangs,” Phillips told The Daily about the hotel's design. “It won’t be mission style. It’ll look like a lot of other houses in the area.”

Stanford officials are busy verbally sketching a design “inspired by the rich heritage of the relaxed California Adobe vernacular and have a low-rise design that will blend into the surrounding landscape and development,” according to the article in The Almanac on May 25.

Palo Alto architect John C. Hill of Hill Glazier Architects would design the hotel.

The many buildings comprising the hotel would be integrated into a village of smaller structures interspersed with “intimate courtyards,” The Almanac, a Menlo Park-based weekly newspaper, reported. The structures will be arranged to provide guests with an optimum view of the foothills.

Stanford owns the land parcel but will not be building the hotel on its own. The University has teamed up with Rosewood Hotels and Resorts, a company known for its Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel in Dallas and The Carlyle hotel in New York City, which will operate and manage the hotel.

The Menlo City Council will make the hotel proposal a top priority because of its central location and because of the revenue it will generate for the city in sales taxes.

In an article in The Almanac, Menlo Park Mayor Mickie Winkler agreed that the hotel could be an excellent money-maker for the city, adding that it might reduce traffic because guests wouldn’t have to travel through the downtown area to get to their hotel.