Hiren Desai can see most of Southside Chattanooga from the rooftop of his group’s newest local hotel, the Caption by Hyatt on Main Street, and he sees a fundamentally different city than the one he moved to in 1987 for college.
Desai, 56, is part of a class of longtime local developers who have built a new kind of Chattanooga. His portfolio shows a knack for notching firsts while predicting areas of future growth.
His company, 3H Group, opened the first waterfront hotel in the city in 2012, one of the earliest Moxy by Marriott hotels in the U.S. in 2018 on Market Street and the city’s first Hyatt-branded hotel this year. The group is branching into residential developments in Southside Gardens, a neighborhood across South Broad Street from the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium. Desai began buying property in that area more than 10 years ago.
3H Group has developed more than 50 hotels since Desai cofounded it with two mentors, Harshad Shah and Harshad Naik, in 2000. At the time, the group’s name came from the first names of its founders.
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