New upscale, boutique hotels planned for CT. It’s a niche spreading across the state.

A new boutique hotel about to open in Litchfield along with another planned in Middletown and two heavily upscale hotels coming to Mystic and Westport indicate Connecticut’s hospitality industry is bouncing back from the pandemic, but with a different emphasis than before.

The niche for smaller, ultra-stylish hotels is drawing plenty of action this year, with developers constructing or proposing nearly a half-dozen across the state.

But the demand for large, mid-market hotels catering to weekday business travelers, conventions, class reunions and similarly large events still appears significantly weaker than before 2020.

There are exceptions such as the Hilton Home2Suites in East Haven , the Woodspring Suites extended-stay hotel in Newington and a few others, but most new hotel development in Connecticut over the past few years has focused on boutique hotels and small, heavily upscale operations.

In Litchfield, Lexington Partners is finishing work on the conversion of the historic courthouse into the The Abner boutique hotel, anticipated to be a pricy destination when it opens in late summer.

“Constructed in 1888, the iconic stone building is being given new life as The Abner featuring 20 beautiful and spacious guest rooms, a stunning new restaurant in the historic main courtroom, a seasonal roof bar affording sweeping views of the surrounding countryside, and private meeting and social spaces,” according to its website.

Middletown earlier this month approved Brill Hospitality’s proposal to convert two vacant South Main Street buildings into The Doug, a 20-room boutique hotel.

Brill wants to extensively renovate the historic Mather-Douglas House and the Pewter Building to accommodate the project, which will include a bistro restaurant primarily for hotel guests.

Delamar, the upscale chain that operates in West Hartford, Fairfield and Greenwich, later this year plans to open locations in Westport and Mystic . The one in Mystic will have 31 rooms and suites — each with a view of the water. There also will be a 2,600-square-foot ballroom that will be available as a site for weddings, corporate events and other types of celebrations.

Delamar CEO Charles Mallory told The Courant in May that he was blown away when he saw the work that had been done on the Mystic property to date. Mystic is about an hour from Hartford and two hours from Boston. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

The Delamar Westport will have 86 guest rooms, full-service restaurant, bar with outdoor dining and lounge areas, meeting spaces, private function rooms, fitness facility, and an indoor pool, according to the company.

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The state lost more than 1,200 mid-scale rooms in the past few years, with many operators blaming the devastating losses during the pandemic when leisure and business travel all but stopped.

The affected hotels were chiefly name brands like Hilton, Doubletree, Marriott and Holiday Inn. Some had been struggling even before COVID struck. Still, the loss of large hotels in Farmington, Norwalk, Bridgeport and Cromwell — and the massive cut in inventory at the former Hartford Hilton — has helped to drive up occupancy rates and room prices at nearby hotels that survived.

Two of central Connecticut’s premiere convention hotels, the 381-room Hartford Marriott Farmington and the former 214-room Crowne Plaza in Cromwell, are simply gone.

The Marriott was shut down for two years to undergo extensive redesign as a luxury apartment complex, while the Cromwell property, already in steep decline as it dropped down to the Radisson family and then to the budget Red Lion brand, was simply closed and boarded up.

In Fairfield County, the eight-story, 265-room Doubletree in Norwalk has been torn down to provide more parking space for Costco, while the 123-room Bridgeport Holiday Inn has been converted to the Park City Place apartment complex.

In Hartford, the 22-story Hilton downtown operated for years with 393 rooms until occupancy rates plummeted during the pandemic. It has been rebranded as a Double Tree but with fewer than half as many rooms and just 11 floors; the top half of the building was converted to apartments .

Hartford had seen residential conversions of hotels in the past decade, including the former Sonesta on Constitution Plaza, the Homewood Suites on Asylum Street and the Red Lion on Morgan Street.