At the heart of one of American real estate's most ambitious urban bets — the $3.5 billion Water Street Tampa development — stands a 27-story tower whose architecture had to anchor an entirely new city district rather than simply join an existing one. The JW Marriott Tampa Water Street, completed in 2021 and designed by Coral Gables-based Nichols Brosch Wurst Wolfe & Associates, meets that challenge with a curtain-wall facade that shifts in tone from pewter to warm bronze as daylight moves across it, the podium clad in timber-toned panels that soften the tower's corporate geometry and connect it visually to the palm-lined streetscape below. Inside, New York studio Champalimaud Design found a register between convention-scale hospitality and something more residential in feeling. The double-height lobby lounge, with its grid-relief plaster walls bathed in soft violet uplighting and a central bar framed by floor-to-ceiling glass, has the atmosphere of a contemporary art-world gathering space rather than a conference hotel atrium. The 519 guestrooms carry that sensibility upward: woven cane headboard panels, blonde oak joinery, burnished brass sconces, and floor-to-ceiling windows that frame Tampa's growing skyline like a live canvas. A long lap pool on the podium roof, lined with travertine and white cabanas, provides an unexpected horizontal counterpoint to the tower's vertical ambition — and a reminder that even in a city still finding its form, Water Street has arrived with considerable conviction.

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