INDIAN COUNTRY
Hospitality hotbed Morehart leads very active market for Mortenson By STEVE BURKS
H
ospitality is a hot commodity right now in the Arizona market, with Phoenix as the epicenter. There are hospitality projects underway in markets all over the Valley and these new projects come on the heels of one of the most anticipated hotel projects Arizona has seen in a while, the Great Wolf Lodge in Scottsdale on Salt River PimaMaricopa Indian Community land. “Right now, I’m involved with three hotel projects, Hyatt House/Hyatt Place in Tempe, another one we’re breaking ground on in March and then another one in the design phase,” said Melanie Morehart, project executive for Mortenson Construction, who was a project executive on the Great Wolf Lodge project and is the project executive on the Hyatt Place/Hyatt House project. “It’s exciting, just the
HYATT HOUSE/HYATT PLACE: The 151,000-square-foot hotel is the first project to go up in the Tempe Novus Innovation Corridor.
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opportunity in the Valley right now, I think it’s great. I think it was just the right time for it to explode in the Valley.” Morehart has had her hand in some marquee hospitality projects during her career. Morehart transferred to Mortenson’s Phoenix office in 2019 to lead all of the company’s local hospitality projects. Before coming to Phoenix, Morehart worked for Mortenson in Denver, where she led the construction of the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center, a 1.96 million square foot, 85 acre development that includes a 1,500room Marriott hotel, more than 1.9 million square feet of hotel, retail, commercial and convention space and indoor/outdoor recreational park. “That was an amazing project,” Morehart said. “It was just huge,
challenging, and we were on that job for 34 months, so I spent a lot of time on it, so you feel a huge sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. “But I really am enjoying the Hyatt Place/Hyatt House in Tempe right now. Because the atmosphere right there is really fun. It’s super exciting being right there on ASU’s campus and all of the other construction that’s nearby, there’s a really cool sense of excitement in that area right now.” Morehart began her career with Mortenson as a project engineer and worked her way up through the ranks. She said before she became a hospitality project executive, she worked on a large, diverse range of projects that helped shape how she operates in her current role. “I actually have a real varied background,” Morehart said. “I’ve done
