DETROIT - The Archdiocese of Detroit's property in Plymouth Township is ready to get an upgrade.

A local developer is expected to round up investors to build a 118-room, three-and-a-half star hotel to vastly increase the usefulness of St. John Center. The hotel, to be called The Inn at St. John's, will cost about $24 million.

The developer ''is going to form a company that is going to pay 100 percent of the cost of construction for The Inn at St. John's," said Mike Gorman, the archdiocesean director of finance and administration.

The St. John Center is divided into two entities – the nonprofit St. John Center for Youth & Family and the for-profit St. John Conference Facility. Cardinal Adam Maida's master plan for the center is to have the for-profit side of the business offset costs for the nonprofit side.

In effect, the hotel lease will help fund ministry for youth and family.

The hotel will be connected to the northeast side of the St. John Center. The archdiocese will lease the requisite land to the developing company. Details of the lease have not been determined, Gorman said, but it likely will be a 20-plus year lease for which the archdiocese will receive about $20 million.

In addition to the lease revenue, the St. John Conference Facility could profit several million dollars per year from additional business generated from the hotel.

Paul Wegert, general manager for Hotel Investment Services Inc., which manages St. John Conference Facility, said the hotel will allow the center to host overnight conferences for large corporate customers such as nearby auto suppliers Visteon Corp. and Johnson Controls Inc. It also could help accommodate guests for the 200-plus weddings held at St. John Center each year.

Plymouth Township's planning commission recently gave preliminary approval to the expansion plans; groundbreaking likely will be this summer.

The seven-story hotel will include a pool, a restaurant and state-of-the-art fitness facilities. The same architects that renovated St. John Center, a former seminary, will be working on the hotel. The design will blend with the current facility, said Wegert.

"It will tie in with the same architectural concept with the conference center," he said, "so it will look like a part of it, the (hotel) lobby will mimic the atrium of the conference center."

The hotel could be operational as early as fall 2005.