Sawmill Hotel
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico Size: 135,000 SF, 125 Keys Status: Construction Permit Pending Program: Hotel Client: Heritage Hotels & Resorts
chevron_leftA New Landmark Hotel in Albuquerque
Sawmill Hotel introduces a new boutique hospitality destination to Albuquerque’s Sawmill District, transforming a long-vacant site into a contemporary destination with 125 guest rooms, active ground-floor amenities, and a rooftop pool overlooking the Sandia Mountains and Rio Grande Valley.
The hotel extends the Sawmill District’s ongoing revitalization toward Rio Grande Boulevard while strengthening connections between Old Town, Museum Row, and the city’s Arts, Cultural, and Residential Districts.
Conceived as a series of stacked porches, the hotel reimagines hospitality as a sequence of shaded outdoor rooms. A shaded public plaza anchors the ground floor, private terraces extend the guest rooms above, and the rooftop becomes a communal overlook across the Rio Grande Valley and Sandia Mountains. Guests experience the desert climate through these outdoor spaces rather than enclosed corridors. Stepped upper floors reduce the building’s perceived scale while creating self-shading terraces.
The design draws from generations of Southwestern knowledge about living in concert with the high desert climate. Lessons from Ancestral Puebloan settlements, traditional portales, and the self-shading geometry of native cacti are translated into an architecture shaped by climate, community, and outdoor living.
A series of weathering steel screens further moderates solar exposure, with perforations calibrated to orientation to balance shade, daylight, privacy, and views.
The screens layered composition echoes the horizontality of New Mexico’s landscape and the exposed strata of its ancient rock formations. The material palette reinterprets the industrial character of the former sawmill through board-formed concrete, weathering steel, and locally sourced stone.