Cheaha State Park Lodge

The guiding principles of the project’s design were to create a new hotel facility that fully leverages its extraordinary location atop Mount Cheaha and provides dedicated public spaces for gathering and viewing to generate the sense of a vibrant, lived-in mountaintop village.

Chosen as Alabama’s first state park in 1933, Cheaha State Park features 2,799 acres of rugged mountain landscapes in the Appalachian foothills. The Creek Nation called it Cheaha, meaning “the high place,” and the park is home to the state’s highest point at 2,407 feet.

Under this renovation and new construction project, most of the dilapidated Cheaha Park Hotel will be demolished and a new lodge built in its place while the iconic Vista Event Center and restaurant will be renovated and enhanced with an addition that will serve as the lobby and connector to the lodge. One of the four existing hotel buildings will remain and be repurposed to consolidate park administration and law enforcement into a unified office area.

The new hotel will feature 32 guest units with private balconies in eight (8) unique room configurations, including pet-friendly and connecting rooms. A rooftop bar and lounge will provide sweeping 360-degree viewing range. The horizontal stepping scheme of the building’s form will navigate with the sloped topography of the site and capitalize on previously inaccessible views.

The Cheaha State Park lodge is the state’s largest CLT construction project and wood for its construction will be sourced from Alabama timber. Additional material choices include exposed stone and rock to celebrate native, renewable building materials in their raw, natural state and complement the distinctive features of Cheaha’s New Deal Era Civilian Conservation Corps structures.

Between the buildings, walking paths sprinkled with a variety of seating options will encourage guests to freely explore on foot, or to pause and gather. Native and drought-tolerant plants, trees, and wildflowers will provide a variety of low-maintenance landscaping to further integrate the architecture into the natural habitat.