New hotel, apartments and more planned for Lexington’s Hamburg area
A Lexington developer plans to build a hotel and apartment buildings in a multi-use development in the rapidly expanding Hamburg area.
Cowgill Inc., a longtime Lexington developer, filed new development plans with Lexington planning officials in December. Those plans show some tweaks to the 44-acre, long-planned development called Hamburg East.
The new plans include a four-story hotel with a pool near the intersection of Commerce Avenue and Cowgill Way. The planned hotel is a Hampton Inn and Suites, said Joe Brumley, a vice president with Cowgill.
The city planning staff must sign off on the new plans before the group can move forward. Brumley said they hope to start construction on the hotel by late summer and hope the hotel will open by 2028.
Last year, Cowgill also got city approval for four apartment buildings, with a total of 274 units. The plans for the new apartments, located near the southeast corner of the property bordering Polo Club Boulevard, also include a clubhouse and a pool.
Construction on those apartment buildings will also start this summer and will likely open in 2028, Brumley said.
The apartments and the hotel will be the first buildings constructed on the property.
The development will also include restaurants, retail and apartments. Cowgill Inc. broke ground on the new development in February 2024.
The group has spent much of the past two years grading and preparing infrastructure for the site, including building new roads and installing utilities.
The plans call for extensive green space and walking trails for the entire area to use, Brumley said.
The site will have an entrance off of Winchester Road that will connect it to Hume Road.
The new development is near the new Baptist Health Lexington campus on Polo Club Boulevard, which opened in April 2024.
Plans for the project initially included a nearby tract for University of Kentucky HeathCare to build a second health care campus. However, the university quietly nixed those plans in 2023.
