 Birmingham, AL—The Tutwiler Hotel’s busiest weekend of the year is the third weekend in June, when thousands of Birmingham residents and visitors line up just outside of the hotel courtyard to enjoy the wide variety of music featured on City Stages, Birmingham’s annual music festival. With this captive audience right at their door, the hotel saw a perfect opportunity to promote its $7.2 million restoration project.
The hotel embraced the festival atmosphere and hired Birmingham artist Michael Swann to paint a giant portrait of the historic hotel on an 8- by 10-foot canvas hung on scaffolding positioned only a few feet from the festival entrance. A banner above read “Pardon Our Preservation: Renovations Underway This Summer.”
“The idea behind the campaign is to position The Tutwiler as a historic work of art,” said William Murray, president of Integral Hospitality Solutions, which bought the hotel in March. “We want people to know that the renovation project as focused on preserving The Tutwiler’s historic beauty and restoring the hotel to its original grandeur.”
The hotel’s advertising campaign, “Pardon Our Preservation,” features an oil painting of the hotel and a worker on a ladder painting a work of art. Having Swann work on a “real” painting of the hotel in “real” time during the festival next to a picture of an artist painting the same hotel, enabled the concert crowd to experience a fun cycle of life imitating art imitating life. “The live art event was a great way to show the City Stages fans that we were interested and involved in the event,” said Bryan Groover, general manager, The Tutwiler. “It made our guests and tens of thousands of City Stages patrons aware that The Tutwiler is about to be a whole new hotel.”
The historic hotel features 1,870-square-foot Ridgeley Ballroom, several boardrooms, and 4,000 square feet of additional meeting facilities.
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