During a January 7th meeting of the Plymouth Township Planning Agency, the members of the agency voted 4-3 to not recommend a special exception that would have allowed the conversion of the former DoubleTree Suites at 640 Fountain Road in Plymouth Meeting (Plymouth Township) into apartments. The property owner, Kingsbury Financial, closed the hotel in November 2025.

The planning agency’s role in this process is to review the application (view) and consider whether to make a recommendation to the zoning hearing board, which will render the final decision. The application is on the January 19th agenda for the zoning hearing board.

The hotel had 253 suites. If converted, the plan is for 173 one-bedroom and 40 two-bedroom units. The units would be 600 and 1,200 square feet, respectively.

The audio provided by the township for the meeting was not the best. The attorney for the applicant was on a mic, but the members of the agency were not (making it difficult to follow the questions asked and concerns raised). The hearing was quite short. It only took approximately 20 minutes. You can listen to the hearing below (it is cued to the start of the presentation).

This is the second major conversion to apartments sought in the township in recent years. Keystone Investment + Development successfully sought to amend the zoning code to permit, by conditional use, the conversion of existing office buildings to apartments within the Shopping Center Zoning District. A conversion of the office building adjacent to the Plymouth Meeting Mall is currently underway and will have 150 apartments.

The former DoubleTree is not within the Shopping Center Zoning District and is not an office building. It is located across Hickory Road from the Plymouth Meeting Mall and falls within the Planned Office Park Zoning District.

Hotels are an allowable use within the Planned Office Park Zoning District, and the application states that apartments are of the “same general character as a permitted use ” within the zoning district.” In the end, the majority of the agency members did not accept that argument.

A similar argument was made in 2021, when PREIT, the owner of the majority of the Plymouth Meeting Mall property, sought to construct apartments at the mall (this is unrelated to Keystone’s apartments). The zoning hearing board denied that application.

More to come.