A five-story, 147-room, 115,000-square-foot hotel opened in Duarte early this month at a construction cost of $65 million.

But this is unlike most other hotels: it’s located on the campus of City of Hope and is designed specifically for patients recovering from cancer and other medical treatments, the patients’ families, as well as traveling medical professionals.

To accommodate both patients and their family members, the hotel includes 116 rooms with two sleeping areas separated by a partition, as well as 15 pairs of adjoining rooms with connecting doors.

This patient-centric hotel is part of a growing trend of similar facilities at or near medical campuses. For example, the same week that this hotel opened, the Murietta City Council in Riverside County was considering an agreement to build a similar-sized hotel near the campus of Loma Linda University Medical Center. That facility would offer temporary living space for hospital staff and traveling medical professionals, though not for recovering patients.

“We are starting to see more developers looking at opening hotels adjacent to hospital/medical facilities,” said Alan Reay, president of Newport Beach-based Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel development consulting firm. “Hospitals are a very strong demand generator for hotels, from people/family visiting relatives, to providing accommodations to medical staff and trainees.”

Reay said this mirrors a similar trend that’s been underway for more than a decade with the siting of hotels near universities that cater to visiting professors and alumni.
The Duarte hotel is one of the centerpieces of a 20-year, $1 billion modernization and expansion of the City of Hope’s 116-acre campus in that San Gabriel Valley city that began in late 2018 and also includes new outpatient, research, office and warehouse space, along with associated parking structures and roadway improvements.

According to the announcement, a primary function of the hotel is to house patients who have undergone treatment and/or clinical trials at City of Hope and are experiencing side effects from that treatment. The advantage of staying at this onsite hotel is the proximity to the patients’ care teams.

However, there are no doctor visits to the hotel; if recovering patients need medical attention, they are quickly transported to the appropriate medical facilities and care team elsewhere on the City of Hope campus.

The hotel also has facilities and staff to help coordinate care for international and non-English-speaking patients. And there’s a restaurant for both hotel guests and the general public.

According to executives at the City of Hope, room rates for recovering patients are determined on a case-by-case basis, depending on the patient’s treatment plan and/or ability to pay. The executives did not address the issue of room rates for visiting medical professionals.

As a result, there’s little way to gauge at any point in time how many guests would be paying the market rate for rooms in the San Gabriel Valley area.
Until this hotel opened on Dec. 7, recovering patients, their families and visiting health professionals had been housed in several bungalow buildings on the campus. The new hotel triples the accommodation space for these uses.

Prodigious donors

Funding for the new hotel came largely from a donation of an unspecified amount from the Judith & Bernard Briskin Foundation. The late Bernard Briskin was the longtime board chairman and chief executive for Arden Group Inc., parent of Gelson’s Markets until it was sold to Fort Worth, Texas-based TPG Capital in 2014.

Over the years, the Briskins have been prodigious donors to the City of Hope campus; the Briskin name adorns a center for clinical research, an imaging center, a center for multiple myeloma research, and several research funds and grant programs.

With the Briskin foundation donation to the hotel project, the hotel was named the Judith and Bernard Briskin Hope Village.

“With rejuvenating, healing accommodations and amenities, this amazing facility was specifically designed to foster recovery and offer peace of mind,” Robert Stone, City of Hope’s chief executive, said in the hotel opening announcement. “The Judith & Bernard Briskin Hope Village hotel is a testament to our patient-centric approach and a central part of how we keep patients and families together when they need it most.”

Judith Briskin also focused her comments on the hotel’s ability to care for patients recovering from cancer and other treatments they underwent at the adjacent medical facilities.

“If Bernie (Briskin) were still with us, he would be so proud and honored to have his name associated with Hope Village, which offers a warm and welcoming place for families and their loved ones who are often undergoing difficult treatments for the most devastating illnesses,” Briskin said in the announcement.