Four Seasons Resort Oahu at Ko Olina opens Friday

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COURTESY CHRISTIAN HORAN

One of the oceanfront rooms at the Four Seasons Resort Oahu, which has 371 rooms for guests.

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A brand-name high-end luxury hotel will return to Ko Olina Resort & Marina on Friday.

The Four Seasons Resort Oahu at Ko Olina is opening after 17 months renovating the former JW Marriott Ihilani hotel that closed in January 2015.

Friday’s opening represents a first phase of an estimated $500 million project that includes developing a second phase with a new 15-story tower with 150 luxury residences to be sold under the Four Seasons name for $5 million to $10 million each.

The new hotel features 371 lodging units compared with 387 units at the Ihilani.

When the Ihilani closed, it put 487 employees out of work. Four Seasons has hired 710.

Room rates start at $709 per night, according to a Four Seasons announcement in April. The priciest suite on the property is the two-bedroom penthouse with 3,200 square feet of interior space that rents for $17,000 a night.

The master developer of Ko Olina, Jeff Stone, arranged the Four Seasons deal in 2014 when his local firm, The Resort Group, partnered with Canadian development firm Westbank to buy the Ihilani property from Connecticut-based Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers LLC.

When the Four Seasons project was announced, plans included selling about half the units in the first phase as resort condominiums for $1.5 million to $5 million apiece. A Ko Olina representative said Wednesday that the condo units will be offered for sale in the future.

The Ihilani opened in 1993 before being branded as a JW Marriott hotel, and was the first hotel at Ko Olina, a 650-acre master-planned resort in West Oahu conceived in the mid-1980s fronting four man-made lagoons connected to the ocean and bordered by crescent-shaped beaches.

Other properties at the resort include several private resort residential communities, a golf course, a boat marina, a Marriott timeshare complex and Disney’s Aulani hotel.

One more hotel and condo development is in the works by China Oceanwide Holdings Group Co. Ltd., which paid $200 million for a lagoon-front site at the resort in December. The company plans to build two towers, one for the hotel and one for the condo. Stone said in December that construction on the combined 800-unit project was expected to start by the end of this year and finish in 2018.