The first thing architect George Signori noticed when he stepped inside the former Elks lodge in Tacoma, Washington, a few years ago was the water coming through cracks in the ceiling.
"It was essentially raining inside," said Signori, a principal at architecture firm Ankrom Moisan. He said people were living inside the building, and it felt "dangerous to be near it," with portions falling apart, plaster crumbling, graffiti-covered surfaces and dozens of pigeons nesting inside. Drop ceilings installed in the 1940s led the ceiling to cave in.
Yet a transformation of the derelict building was completed in 2018 with the property reopening and rechristened as the McMenamins Elks Temple, a development featuring 45 hotel rooms, bars, a restaurant, and a performance space called the Spanish Ballroom.
Projects for client McMenamins Pubs, Breweries & Hotels can seem daunting at first, but they have turned out to be successful thanks to what the company describes as profitable hotel and dining businesses generating enough revenue to let McMenamins self-finance upcoming expansion projects. Signori and Ankrom Moisan have completed 114 projects for McMenamins, ranging from full building remodels to installing heaters for awning-covered outdoor spaces.
McMenamins' properties are in the Pacific Northwest, with 46 in Oregon and 10 in Washington state. Privately held McMenamins does not report financial figures.
Overall, hotels in Portland generated an average of $53,253 in revenue per available room in 2024, compared with expenses of $42,760 per room, according to CoStar data. The operating expense ratio measures how efficiently a hotel manages its properties. The Seattle market generated an average of $48,893 in revenue per available room compared to expenses of $35,442 per room.
Saving old buildings
Signori cited what he called the flawless instincts of brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin as the reason why the projects have been successful. Word has gotten out, too, and a number of cities and towns in Oregon and Washington have pitched local buildings to McMenamins to consider for conversions.
"McMenamins has such a great track record that most communities are happy to see them come in," Signori said. "They ask them to save their churches or schools or libraries."
Shannon McMenamin, the company president, said they are drawn to buildings "that are significant to their communities," adding that "people love the look of these buildings or they remember their grandparents telling them they spent time in the building back in the day."
McMenamins has artists and historians on staff who stock each property with installations that connect the buildings to their pasts. The Kennedy School in Portland, for example, is filled with photos and text on the walls telling the stories of children who attended school there before it closed in 1975.
A number of McMenamins' properties are in buildings that require some degree of historic preservation. The structures include former schools, churches, train depots, a county "poor farm" and even a former U.S. Mint building in the Oregon state capital of Salem.
The McMenamins' business plan almost certainly wouldn't work if the company was publicly traded or had significant outside ownership, Signori said. But the brothers control all strategic decisions, meaning they can move on new developments as slowly as they want without worrying that they aren't growing fast enough.
The business structure also gives them the freedom to take on the restoration of buildings that many commercial property developers and investors wouldn't touch, Signori said.
"It's always more money than you think it's going to be," Signori said, referring to the initial cost estimates for an adaptive-reuse project for McMenamins.
Preserving history
None of McMenamins' hotels are listed with the Historic Hotels of America program, administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. McMenamins nevertheless typically qualifies for and obtains federal historic tax credits for its projects, Signori said.
The job that Ankrom Moisan is tasked with completing is relatively simple to explain, but tricky to execute, Signori said. It involves a careful balance between making structural improvements and retaining as much of the original layout as possible. The architect must reconfigure the interior into spaces suitable for things like a hotel room or a pool. Modern amenities must also not overwhelm the historic details that give the building its inherent value.
"With a historic rehabilitation project, you approach it like an embalmer in a funeral home," Signori said. "You're bringing it back to its original state of beauty but, in the end, you still have a corpse."
The interior walls of the Elks Temple in Tacoma were made from hollow clay tiles with no concrete or steel reinforcements. The hollow walls were in danger of collapsing, so Ankrom Moisan had to complete a seismic retrofit of the structure. At the same time, the firm and McMenamins wanted to maintain the building's historic plasterwork.
"We are trying to create something new that has a nod to the past but without having to keep it as a museum-quality installation," Shannon McMenamin said.
Sometimes a historic building can't be made to look new. That's the case with Signori's latest project for McMenamins, the ongoing restoration of the historic Taft Hotel in Portland. The building was most recently used as low-income housing for disabled seniors. The nonprofit organization that operated the building, Reach Community Development Corp., sold it to McMenamins in 2024.
"It was an old single-occupancy hotel from the mid-1910s and none of the spaces are very large," Signori said. "It's not going to be something that meets the Hilton standard for a hotel. But we know there's still an audience for this type of property."
The audience is likely to be concertgoers, as the Taft Hotel is next to the Crystal Ballroom, a McMenamins-owned entertainment venue with shows that often run late into the night.
Old buildings, new codes
A challenge with work involving older buildings is how to adapt them for modern building codes "when the building wasn't designed for them," according to HLW, a New York-based architecture firm that does adaptive-reuse work. Such codes include accessibility requirements for people with physical disabilities, as well as energy-efficiency standards.
Another new project that Signori is handling for McMenamins involves converting a building for something that wasn't its original use. The project is the conversion of a former mobile phone retail store in Corvallis, Oregon, into a bar. The property is slated to serve as an annex for the neighboring McMenamins Corvallis Pub.
Like most of Signori's work for McMenamins, the Corvallis project doesn't fit many earlier models. For one, the building is only 1,700 square feet and will likely require new construction. Parking is tight. And, perhaps most importantly, the building is in an octagonal shape.
Whatever solution Signori and McMenamins devise for the Corvallis building's conversion will almost certainly be more expensive than demolishing the structure and building something new. Although the costs are higher, McMenamins as a company still makes money on its properties because of their wide appeal, Signori said.
"It isn't so much about what is going to be their return on the investment," Signori said. "But [their properties] do generate a return. They're not running charities here."
McMenamins has more historic buildings in its development pipeline, Shannon McMenamin said. One is an expansion of the Chapel Pub in Portland into a nearby structure the company owns. Another is the hotel conversion of a former jail on the McMenamins Edgefield campus in Troutdale, Oregon.
McMenamins' ability to visualize a new use for a structure is one reason the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland gave them the William J. Hawkins Award for Preservation last year, said Norm Gholston, the center's preservation programs manager.
"Many of the buildings McMenamins chose to convert to brewpubs, restaurants and hotel destinations had little or no chance of being used for what they were originally designed for," Gholston told CoStar News.