Coeurllaborate: hotel+business incubator+makerspace in CdA

Hotel developer Ron Ayers proposes to combine a new, 112-room Fairfield Inn & Suites hotel, a collaborative workspace and business incubator, and space for startup entrepreneurs on a 5-acre lot across from Coeur d’Alene’s Village at Riverstone development.

He has a creative name for this creative venture: Coeurllaborate.

“I believe we as consumers today are looking for a greater value and deeper meaning to our transactions,” said Ayers, who pledged to devote some of the hotel profits to Coeurllaborate. “If you stay here, you are supporting the economic development start-up system that is housed here.”

Ayers hopes to start construction on this $20.5 million project with the hotel in fall and the Coeurllaborate complex following in early 2017. He anticipates opening the four-story, $13 million Fairfield Inn in May 2017 and the entrepreneurial facilities in summer 2017.

The $4.5 million, three-story, 16,000-square-foot Coeurllaborate building – which may get bigger – will have a business “incoeurbator” and co-work space (“coeurwork”).

The $3 million, two-story, makerspace building (no clever way for Ayres to incorporate “coeur”) will have  20,0000 square feet of “big open areas” with half the building dedicated to permanent tenants in shared space and half the space for education, training and learning.

“We’re all collaborating here,” Ayres said. “A makerspace is a place for entrepreneurs who have an idea but they do not have a couple million dollars in equipment.”

Ayers expects to outfit the makerspace with 3D printers, composite material autoclave, a computer numerical control machine, other equipment, and at least four Microsoft Surface Hub – the next generation chalk board or whiteboard that allows people at multiple locations to write on the board.

Ayers is a hotel franchise developer who has determined where to place more than 100 franchise hotels  in 16 states. Hotel development plummeted after Sept. 11, 2001, when Ayers was living in San Diego. Six months later, bought a Sleep Inn in Post Falls (his girlfriend lived in Hayden) and moved to northern Idaho.

A year later, Ayers bought the Garden Motel in Coeur d’Alene – the first of nine adjacent lots that now comprise the Coeurllaborate/Fairfield Inn project. The existing motel will be demolished.