In addition to the team, executives from Omni Hotels and Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor, watched a crane lift an evergreen to the top of the structure that has just under 400 days left of construction as part of a traditional ceremony among builders.
The ceremony commemorates the last beam being placed on the hotel. Once completed, there will be 510 guest rooms, three pools and 127,000 square feet of meeting space in the hotel located on the southwest corner of PGA Parkway and Legacy Drive.
“This hotel is obviously the crown jewel of what we have out here, but other than this, there's 34 individual structures here on site,” Tyler Davis, project manager at Brasfield & Gorrie, said at the ceremony. “At this point, we've completed 10 of those.”
The 60-acre site will feature 12 restaurants, some of which will be in the hotel building. A 21-treatment room spa, TopGolf lounge and a PGA coaching center will also be highlights of the $520 million project.
Omni has branded the project as a place that even people with little to no interest in golf will want to visit. But for the golf lovers, there will be two championship courses, a 10-hole short course that will be open day and night and a 2-acre putting green called “The Dance Floor.”
“There's not a project like this being built in North America,” said Jeff Smith, vice president and managing director of the Omni PGA Frisco Resort. “It'll rival any notable golf resort, literally in North America, but this is Frisco, so we know it's going to be No. 1.”
The first major event at the resort will be the KitchenAid Senior PGA Golf Tournament in May 2023. The tournament will come just over a year after the new PGA headquarters opens this April.
Still, speakers at the ceremony acknowledged that there is a lot of work to be done before the first guests check in and golfers are perfecting their swings.
Chris Hartman, senior project manager at Brasfield & Gorrie, said that when crews were working on the highest portions of the hotel, workers were pouring about 2,000 cubic yards of concrete per week.
“That's a lot of concrete. The job site fences were open from basically midnight to 6 p.m.,” Hartman said. “Teamwork, which is one of our foundational values, is what got us to be where we're at today. And teamwork is what's going to make this project a success when we finish and you all bring your kids here, and you show your family, and you hit hole in ones out there.”
