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 YESTERDAY

 In the late 1970’s Patrick R. Colee was an ambitious and aspiring young entrepreneur who took advantage of several opportunities to be involved in diverse areas of real estate development.  He formed a company then known as Westgroup Partner, Inc., and became a buyer of diverse interests in commercial, retail, office, residential, and multi-family real estate projects.  All with positive degrees of success.  The projects Westgroup Partner, Inc. undertook became unique commercial structures in harmony with local culture and the environment.

 In 1981 Westgroup Partner, Inc., in collaboration with New England Life Insurance Company, purchased a commercial block of improved real estate in downtown Dallas, Texas.  Predominantly consisting of office buildings, the block also contained an historically well known but poorly maintained hotel component known as the Adolphus Hotel.  The hotel had been built by and in homage to Adolphus Busch, the patriarch of the celebrated “beer baron” family.  In disrepair and subjected to mismanagement for years, the Adolphus was initially considered a liability to the viability of the purchased block.

 After fruitless attempts to hire an effective hotel management company to operate the hotel, Mr. Colee decided to lead a charge to fully renovate the hotel and create his own hotel ownership and management organization.  The result was the genesis of Noble House Hotels and Resorts and the revitalization of one of the most historically significant and operationally successful luxury hotels in the United States, and the home of one of the most respected and critically acclaimed restaurants in the country. For the next twenty five years under the tutelage and direction of Mr. Colee, the Adolphus, where presidents and royalty and heads of state found respite when in Dallas, thrived in it’s tradition of elegance, charm and excellence.

 Consumed with a passion for all elements and aspects of the hotel business spawned by the Adolphus experience, Mr. Colee and his Westgroup Partner colleagues slowly and steadily increased their interest in hotel ownership through the creative acquisition of unique properties, each of which had its’ own distinctive community and culturally significant reputation and classification. In the ensuing decade, Westgroup acquired the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Washington, at that time and today the only waterfront hotel in Seattle. A mainstay of the collection, the Edgewater has been owned and managed by the Colee interests in a manner that has made it a proud Seattle landmark and a financial success. 

Recognizing that he and the Westgroup Partner, Inc. staff now exuded a genuine passion for the hotel ownership and management business, and an uncanny ability and vision to select and acquire properties with great potential and significance, Mr. Colee next acquired the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach (Los Angeles), California.  Shortly after the takeover, the hotel was demolished by a “storm of the century”, leaving Westgroup Partner, Inc. with a structural shell of a previously viable operation.  Against significant odds, Mr. Colee rebuilt the hotel, significantly improved it, and to avoid recurring catastrophe, encouraged the regulators to construct the now famous Redondo Beach breakwater directly in front of the hotel. 

In the early ‘90’s the fledgling company  changed its name to Noble House Hotels and Resorts, Ltd. (Noble House), and added its’ first Florida hotel, the Daytona Beach Hilton, which had been constructed by the Root family, a long-standing local family of prominence. Mr. Colee’s ability to turn around the negative operation of the hotel into a substantial and successful element of the new “portfolio” is legendary.  The Daytona Beach acquisition signaled Mr. Colee’s entry into the desirable Florida market.  Following Daytona, Mr. Colee acquired Little Palm Island, the world class island resort located in the Florida Keys.  Known in the travel industry as one of the most exclusive and desirable island retreats in the world, Little Palm Island became the centerpiece of the portfolio and the crown jewel of Noble House Hotels and Resorts.  Florida quickly burgeoned into the bastion of Noble House Hotels, with the addition of the Grove Isle Hotel located in Miami’s exclusive Coconut Grove neighborhood, the Ocean Key Resort in Key West, and the LaPlaya Beach and Golf Resort in Naples, a project in which Noble House is an equal ownership partner with the Barron Collier family enterprise. 

As the company matured,  Mr. Colee diversified the geography of the collection by adding unique, one-of-a kind hotel properties in locations including Santa Fe, New Mexico and San Diego, California.  Simultaneous to these strategic acquisitions Noble House led by Mr. Colee was also accumulating a collection of management agreements coupled with interests from hotel ownership companies and “REIT’s”, covering properties located in prime travel and tourism locations such as Seattle, Southern California, Newport, Rhode Island, and the Florida panhandle.