The Delafield Hotel, which will open for business later this month, will be one of the most luxurious hotels in the metropolitan Milwaukee area. The 38-room boutique hotel at 415 Genesee St. is owned by Andrew Ruggeri, who is leasing the building from Robert Lang, owner of The Lang Cos. Ruggeri helped develop and open Hotel Metro, the 65-room boutique hotel in downtown Milwaukee. He also managed Hotel Metro for four years.
Ruggeri is not afraid to set high expectations for The Delafield Hotel, which will employ about 60 people.
"We have the highest standards (of any hotel) in the state," he said. "Our service will be unmatched. I don’t think anyone (in Wisconsin) is going to have the type of rooms and feeling that we have."
That says a lot when Wisconsin’s best hotels include the posh Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee and The American Club, the only AAA, five-diamond resort in the Midwest, in Kohler.
However, The Delafield Hotel was accepted as a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World (www.slh.com). The London-based organization has a membership of about 350 independently owned hotels in 60 countries. The Delafield Hotel is the only member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World in the Midwest.
The rooms at The Delafield Hotel are between 500 and 1,500 square feet in size and cost between $250 and $800 a night. Each room includes Baker furniture, a 26-inch flat screen LCD television, a CD stereo, a DVD player (the hotel has a free DVD library) and a mini bar. The beds feature Egyptian cotton linens and down comforters. The bathrooms have Kohler fixtures, granite sinks, a 15-inch LCD TV, bubble-massage chromatherapy bath tubs, multi-jet showers and are stocked with Aveda products.
The hotel also offers valet parking.
The hotel has a bar and restaurant called Andrew’s, which will serve French-influenced American cuisine, and entrees will cost between $22 and $35. Live jazz will be performed in the restaurant, which has 2,000 wines on its wine list. Guests will be able to step into the wine room and choose what they want to drink. They will also be able to see into the wine room through a window in the hotel lobby.
Ruggeri owns another restaurant in downtown Delafield, an organic Italian restaurant called Ruggeri’s Ristorante, which will remain in operation.
The hotel also has a large banquet room that can hold about 300 people, a smaller banquet room that can hold about 60 people and several smaller meeting rooms.
Ruggeri expects to fill the meeting rooms with weddings on the weekends and business meetings during the week.
"We’ve already got 10 weddings booked for this year and several for next year," he said. "Our weekend business is going to be very strong with weddings."
Some business meetings have also already been booked for this year.
"We’re really going to be targeting local businesses (for using the meeting facilities)," Ruggeri said. "But we also think there’s a big need for companies that have offices in Milwaukee and Madison. We’re almost exactly in the middle (of those cities), and we’re just five or six blocks off the expressway."
The hotel also will provide a place for family members of St. John’s Military Academy students to stay, when they are in town visiting their children.
The Delafield Hotel is offering packages with the Erin Hills Golf Course, which Lang is developing 17 miles north of the hotel near Holy Hill in the Town of Erin, and Be Fitness and Wellness Center, an upscale health club that is being developed next door by Andy Littartz. The Delafield Hotel will also promote its location in downtown Delafield and its proximity to Ten Chimneys (the former estate of acting legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Genesee Depot) and Lapham Peak State Park.
The Delafield Hotel will provide transportation service to take guests to and from those attractions and General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee.
The Delafield Hotel
Location
415 Genesee St., Delafield
Owner
Andrew Ruggeri
Rooms
38
Rates
$250 to $800 a night
