A Dallas hotelier’s $100 million plan to restore Galveston’s historic Galvez hotel to its glory days - The Dallas Morning News

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GALVESTON — Mark Wyant wants to give the grande dame of Galveston a little spring to her step.

In May, the 62-year-old owner and CEO of Dallas-based Seawall Hospitality LLC bought the Hotel Galvez & Spa, the matriarch of Galveston’s seafront.

He’s intent on bringing the 110-year-old property to her original splendor while adding vivacity to her personality.

He’s changed the name to Grand Galvez.

“I want to respect its past and ready it for the future,” Wyant said in an interview at the hotel along Galveston’s famed Seawall Boulevard. “It’s gotten into a bit of a rut. I want people to come here for its history and provenance, but enjoy its energy and vibes.”

Wyant’s wife, Lorenda, who is overseeing the hotel’s new interior design, puts it this way: “It’s got great bones and so much potential. It just needs a little love.”

Wyant paid in excess of $50 million for the 224-room property, but that’s just half of what he expects the total cost will be. “By the time I get finished with the redo, I will have spent well over $100 million, absolutely,” Wyant said.

He purchased the property from heirs of the late George Mitchell, a billionaire shale oil extraction pioneer, real estate developer and philanthropist who died in 2013.

Mitchell, who was born on the island but made his fortune in Houston, bought the hotel out of bankruptcy for $3 million in 1993 and spent $20 million on renovations.

The previous owner, the late Denton Cooley, Houston’s famed heart surgeon, made a mess of things by doing such things as moving the entrance to the backside and building a pool in the lobby.

“It made everything smell like chlorine or a sweaty gym,” Wyant said. “Why anyone would build an indoor swimming pool in Galveston is beyond me.”

Mitchell tore out the aquatics and restored the palm tree-lined grand entrance facing the ocean.

“The efforts of George and Cynthia Mitchell essentially saved the property for future generations,” Wyant said. “I would not have the opportunity to take the property to the next level had they not saved it from degenerating into something that somebody would want to bulldoze.”

Turning over Galveston’s iconic hotel to interlopers from Dallas created consternation among the “Islanders,” as Galvestonians proudly call themselves.

“The Galvez has always represented the resilience of the island,” said Michael Woody, chief tourism officer for Galveston Island. “It was built right after the storm of 1900 and became the marker to the world that we were going to survive the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The Mitchells were seen as its guardians.”

But people are beginning to realize that what they thought was original isn’t, Woody said.

“Right now, if you walk through the hotel, within a 200-foot stride, you’re going to pass through four decades of design,” he said. “There’s no consistency. Mark is bringing it all back to its grandeur. The island can really benefit from that.”

1/8Painters work on the outside of the Grand Galvez hotel on July 15 in Galveston.(Thomas B. Shea / Thomas B. Shea)

Hue and cry

Local concern was exacerbated when they learned that Wyant intended to paint the hotel pink.

“They didn’t realize that the hotel was originally pink and only painted white in 1981, when it was owned by Cooley and operated as the Galvez Marriott,” Wyant said.

No one knows exactly what shade of pink the hotel was when it opened. Photos from that era are black and white.

Locals went bonkers when the newspaper ran a photo of a hot pink painted as a test along with other shades, Wyant said. “Everybody thought I was going to paint it like a giant Taco Cabana. That color was never in contention.”

He knew what he wanted. Wyant has always admired The Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, which is painted a soft, sandy mix of salmon and mauve.

He and Lorenda flew to L.A., met with the hotel manager and explained that they wanted to paint the Grand Galvez the same hue. The GM took them down to the basement, gave them a paint can lid and the paint code.

“While everyone else in Beverly Hills was shopping, Lorenda and I were at the Beverly Hills Sherwin-Williams mixing paint. We matched it perfectly. Lorenda even did a couple of touch-ups on their walls to make sure.”

Artist's rendering of what the grand entrance to the Grand Galvez will look like.

It’s that kind of attention to detail that’s winning Islanders over, Woody said. “It helped settle nerves when they painted the north side of the building and saw that it wasn’t going to be a Pepto project.”

Painters won’t tackle the front of the hotel until after the summer season.

Peacocks and crooks

Mark heads construction and operations, while Lorenda supervises interiors — much as they’ve done with Wyant’s three previous historical building projects in New Orleans, Charleston, S.C., and Key West, Fla.

“From Day One, we have always loved the same things and see eye-to-eye on a lot,” Lorenda said. “But we’ll go round and round about colors, certain furniture types, designs for what sometimes seems like forever. But we always end up coming together and creating something pretty magnificent.

“I do win from time to time, but then he claims it was his idea.”

The Wyants want to create better flow, more live entertainment areas and restore the hotel’s Jazz Age fun and energy.

“There will be hints of Al Capone — a nod to the hotel’s laissez faire attitude toward illicit gambling that occurred during Prohibition,” he said.

Sam Maceo ran the island’s rackets and casino operations from his seventh-floor, 11-room penthouse at the Galvez. Frank Sinatra and other stars were frequent visitors. “Suffice it to say, Prohibition didn’t work,” Wyant said.

The couple plans to reincarnate the hotel’s famous Peacock Alley. The long corridor that leads from the lobby to the Music Room has been partially closed off for meeting rooms. Crews discovered original ceiling molding and wall trim behind sheetrock.

“They named it Peacock Alley in the ’20s because men would dress in the finest evening wear and the women would all look like peacocks as they strutted down to the Music Room, which was then called the Venetian Room,” Mark said.

Artist's rendering of what the Grand Galvez's restored Peacock Alley will look like.(Seawall Hospitality LLC)

Not newcomers

Lorenda, 49, bristles at the notion that she’s an outsider.

“Everyone talks about ‘these Dallas people.’ I was born and raised in Houston and lived there my whole life until I married him,” she said, nodding to her husband of 17 years. “My family owned a beach house here. My father owned a surfboard shop here when I was a baby. My grandmother owned a souvenir shop. So I have been coming here my entire life.”

This is Mark’s third hotel along Galveston’s famous seafront strip, having previously owned the Holiday Inn Express and the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort, now a DoubleTree by Hilton.

Wyant, who was born and raised in Garland, is a third-generation hotelier — the family’s first property was the Holiday King Motel in Sulphur Springs that was built by Mark’s schoolteacher parents and his homebuilder grandfather when he was 5.

“After school on Fridays, we’d get in the car and drive about an hour, 80 miles straight down I-35,” Wyant said. “The 36 rooms rented for $8, $9, $10, so 150 bucks was a big night.”

Since then, Wyant and his relatives have owned and operated 13 properties, including the Big Town Inn in Mesquite and the Holiday Inn Express in Dumas.

Jon Contreras has known Wyant since those Big Town Inn days, when Contreras was an 18-year-old night auditor and 14-year-old Mark used to pester him behind the desk.

“After a while we became friends,” said Contreras, who now owns a Dallas tax preparation company. “We both liked aviation. We didn’t have a car, so we’d drive the Big Town Inn shuttle bus and use the airport locator to find all of the little airports that used to dot the countryside around town.”

Contreras has always been impressed by his buddy’s drive and dependability.

And happily, Wyant has mellowed with age, Contreras said.

When they were kids, Contreras said, “whether I wanted to go or not, he’d be banging on my window and charging me up. He’s really calmed down a lot. We like to joke that he’s the kinder, gentler Mark nowadays.”

Oshkosh b’gosh

Wyant learned to fly in a beat-up Piper Tri-Pacer that he bought as a teenager from wages earned as a desk clerk at his parents’ Mesquite hotel and washing dishes at the Addison Airport restaurant.

“That was when I realized that you can achieve anything if you churned away and worked hard enough,” he said.

Wyant, who earned his undergraduate degree from SMU’s Cox School of Business in 1981, laddered his way up from giving flying lessons at Addison Airport, flying small freight planes out of Love Field, joining Air Midwest, then American Eagle, to flying international and Hawaiian jumbo jet routes for American Airlines for 22 years.

Wyant only kept his 1958 single-propeller Tri-Pacer for about a year, but it held a special place in his heart.

Forty years after selling it, Wyant tracked down the original owner and bought back the plane. He spent more than $250,000 restoring it and updating it to meet today’s flying requirements.

“I won the grand championship at Oshkosh [AirVenture] with it in 2017, which is like winning the Pebble Beach of small planes,” he said.

It’s that kind of devotion he hopes to bring to the Galvez.

Mark Wyant with his Piper PA-22 Tri-Pacer, which won Grand Champion at the world-renowned Oshkosh AirVenture in 2017.(Seawall Hospitality LLC)

Big Easy for a song

Wyant has always been a sucker for history.

In 2009, while taking a morning stroll with Lorenda along Canal Street in New Orleans, they passed a boarded-up, 100-year-old eyesore called The Audubon. Developers had gutted the eight-story building, intending to turn it into a Hilton. But they walked on the deal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The bank had owned it for two years and was willing to offload it for a song.

“We paid $5.35 million for the property in the heart of downtown,” said Wyant, who did the project in partnership with his mother, Jana. “That was an incredibly good deal, because it was eligible for almost $9 million in federal, state and historic tax credits. We pretty much bought the building for nothing.”

Wyant wanted the entrance to be as close to its original format as possible. He scoured the online archives of the Library of Congress and found photos of the building when it opened in 1909.

“It was almost like an archaeological dig,” Wyant said. “We used those photos as the template to rebuild the whole front of the property.”

That included replacing the large canopy that had fallen off the building in 1931, killing three people.

Wyant tracked down the manufacturer of the original tin-pressed ceiling tiles and ordered replacements. Lorenda applied the antique finishing touches to them while standing on scaffolding.

All told, Wyant spent $28 million on The Saint New Orleans. He sold it in late March for $40 million.

“It was a very difficult decision to sell it,” he said. “If I didn’t have the opportunity to buy the Galvez, there would have been no way that I would have sold it in the open market.”

He’s in the process of selling The Saint boutique in Charleston, but he’s keeping one in Key West.

Like mother, like son

The Galvez, which had been a Wyndham property until January, is operating as an independent until Wyant upgrades the hotel to Marriott Autograph Collection’s high-end standards.

“Heavy-duty reconstruction will begin in September after the summer season,” Wyant said. “But we’re not going to shut it down. We’re going to do sections at a time.”

The hotel is holding its own, with more than 150 weddings on the books for this year. “We’re amplifying that by adding a small room for selling weddings,” Wyant said.

While we were sitting at the coffee bar in the lobby, general manager Darryl Hill, who has worked for Wyant for 10 years, came to tell Wyant that there was water leaking from the roof into the Music Room.

Without asking for details, Wyant dispatched his wingman — as the two like to think of their relationship —- to take whatever action was necessary.

“This isn’t a dog-and-pony show for you,” Hill said when he returned. “He gives me free rein. He understands operations and lets me do what we need to do to get the job done.”

”There are always surprises with reconstruction,” Wyant said.

He paid $85,000 to replace five iconic palm trees that didn’t come back after February’s historic freeze.

His mother, Jana, who has been a partner with Mark on various hotel projects, has made the trip down on Mark’s private plane but not in an official business capacity.

“This is my venture, but she participates greatly with her opinions and knowledge. Hey, she’s my mom,” he said. “My mother has always been ahead of the curve. Dresses that way. Haircut is that way — short and sassy. She’s in her 80s and took delivery of a new Ferrari last year.”

His father died in 2000.

Jana Wyant said her son makes life very interesting.

“As a business partner, it has been a joy to have a son like Mark,” she said. “He always has something going on. Mark says he’ll never remember me for baking cookies as I’ve been his business partner all his life.

“If anything ever goes sideways, I’m the first phone call he makes.”

David Mark Wyant Sr.

Title: Owner, CEO, Seawall Hospitality LLC

Age: 62

Resides: Preston Hollow

Education: South Garland High School, 1977; bachelor of business administration, Southern Methodist University, 1981

Personal: Married to Lorenda for 17 years. They have a blended family of a son, 16, and an adult son and daughter.

Seawall Hospitality LLC

Ownership: Mark Wyant Sr.

Founded: April 1, 2021

Headquarters: Dallas

Property: 224-room Grand Galvez in Galveston

SOURCE: Mark Wyant

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