TEMECULA -- A five-story Crowne Plaza hotel -- the city's first "full-service" hotel -- will be built on the empty lot between the Hampton Inn Suites and the under-construction Marriott hotel on Jefferson Avenue, the stretch of Jefferson just north of the Rancho California Road intersection.

The Temecula Planning Commission voted unanimously to approve the architectural design and the plans for the hotel after a brief public hearing Wednesday night.

The Crowne Plaza will be the first hotel to take advantage of rules established by the Temecula City Council late last year that provided a definition for a "full-service" hotel.

Members of the commission praised the design and the list of amenities the hotel will provide.

"This is huge for our city," Commissioner Ron Guerriero said. "It's a beautiful building."

The Crowne Plaza, in addition to offering 24-hour valet parking, will feature a conference hall and banquet facilities.

Under the old rules, the developer -- WellProfit International -- would have had to scale back the number of rooms to provide the proper amount of parking spaces.

With the new rules, WellProfit can build up to 168 rooms because the hotel will offer valet parking that uses tandem parking spaces, which can accommodate multiple vehicles.

Answering a commissioner's question, the deputy director of public works, Dan York, said traffic generated by the hotel will be negligible.

"Our intersections are operating very well," he said.

A hotel can qualify for the "full-service" tag if it meets certain criteria established by the city, benchmarks that include green construction requirements.

The Crowne Plaza project will feature a "green roof" irrigated by condensation harvested from the air conditioning units.

The president of WellProfit, Tony Lee, has said qualifying as a "full-service" hotel will help the Crowne Plaza development make more efficient use out of the 3.6-acre site.

The design of the Crowne Plaza unveiled Wednesday -- in an apropos touch -- has a regal look.

There are multiple towers that face Jefferson and the color scheme employs golds and rich earth tones.

A city planner said the color pallette and architectural flourishes will help the hotel blend visually with the Marriott project and the Hampton Inn and Suites.

Temecula approved the plans for the Marriott Springhill Suites, scheduled to open this spring, in 2007.

That hotel, area tourism officials said at the time, was expected to boost the number of hotel and motel rooms in the Southwest County to 1,765 rooms.

When both the new Crowne Plaza and the Marriott are posting vacancy signs the number of hotel rooms will top 1,900.

The Crowne Plaza brand name is owned by England-based InterContinental Hotels Group, the world's largest hotel group by number of rooms, according to the company's Web site. Other InterContinental brands include Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites and Candlewood Suites.

Contact staff writer Aaron Claverie at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2624, or aclaverie@californian.com.