Construction crews that are framing what will be Ceres’ tallest commercial building appear as ants scurrying about, grabbing lumber and sheets of oriented strand board.
Since May when the slab was poured, the skeletal four-story structure of the Woodspring Inn & Suites hotel has quickly dominated the Ceres Gateway Center. If past practice follows suit, the 122-room hotel could be open by next summer, giving travelers on Highway 99 a new place to stay for tighter budgets.
Woodspring will be the third hotel in Ceres but the largest at 50,800 square feet and taller than the three-story Microtel Inn. Ceres’ oldest motel, the Howard Johnson Inn, is comprised of a single-story motel with one standalone building of two stories.
While Woodspring has nearly 300 hotels across the nation, it is not a well-known brand in California where there are just seven – two in Bakersfield, and in Indio, Colton, Corona, Los Angeles and Moreno Valley. The chain was founded as Value Place in 2003 but rebranded to Woodspring in April 2015. The chain offers normal and extended stays. According to the company’s website, its guests “tend to book with us for a week, month, or longer. Since we have less turn-over, we pass the savings on to you with weekly and monthly rates that cost less per night the longer you stay!”
The hotels offer kitchens, laundry vending services and gyms.
When the project was approved in September 2022, Planning Commissioner Bob Kachel expressed some apprehension about the hotel being an extended stay facility. Typically extended stay hotels are designed for one-night stays for travelers like regular hotels or up to weekly or months long stays since they have kitchenette features. Kachel feared it might become an apartment complex, saying “I guess I was hoping for a little bit more with as we see hotels coming in – a new hotel, which would be the first one in Ceres in decades.” He added that when seeing the hotels that Turlock has snagged – including Candlewood Suites, the Comfort Suites, Holiday Inn Express, Home2 Suites by Hilton and Hampton Inn that he felt “a little bit uncomfortable” that Woodspring “is the best we’re going to get in Ceres.”
The Woodspring project almost wasn’t approved. Early in 2022, knowing that Woodspring wanted to build only a four-story hotel of 50 feet high, the Ceres City Council appeared unwilling to amend zoning regulations that set a height limit of 35 feet for buildings in the Regional Commercial, or RC zone. Woodspring said without a compromise, the project would be abandoned. When then Councilman Mike Kline abandoned his objections after he was shown the hotel would not block the freeway view of the nearby Walmart Supercenter, the council amended the zoning code to allow the four-story structure.
