Three American Hotels That Chose the Building They Already Had

In the double-height music room on the eleventh floor of the Stoneleigh in Dallas, the wall panelling is five hundred years old and has been restored rather than replaced. There is a minstrels' balcony. There is a chandelier made of 210 pieces of cut crystal. None of it is new, exactly, and that is the point: the room was part of a private penthouse apartment belonging to the hotel's Colonel, decorated by Dorothy Draper, and the Los Angeles and London studio Fettle has spent its renovation deciding what to leave alone.

Three American openings this season share that predicament in different forms. All three are reworkings of existing buildings. None of them is a ground-up tower. And each solves the same problem \u2014 what do you do with an inheritance \u2014 by a completely different method.

Aspen, imported

White Elephant Aspen is the outlier, because the inheritance being managed is the brand's rather than the building's. This is the sixth property for a company whose story starts on Nantucket harbour, and the West End location puts it among Aspen's Victorian stock. Boston firm EMBARC was given room to push against that, and the result reads darker and more modern than the streetscape: charcoal and saddle tones, tasselled leather, textured stone, moody lighting. The 54 rooms and suites run to porcelain tile floors, blonde woods, embossed leather headboards and horsehair. A number have terraces or balconies.

The top of the house is the 1,560-square-foot Ajax Penthouse \u2014 three bedrooms, fireplace, chef's kitchen, a terrace with a fire pit and mountain views. Below it sit the two-bedroom West End Suite at 1,050 square feet and the 870-square-foot Highlands Suite, which pairs two king bedrooms with three bathrooms, a ratio that tells you exactly who it is sold to. Suite guests get an in-suite games library from Arhaus. Chess and backgammon. Fine.

The genuinely serious element here is the art. More than 125 original works, assembled by Emily Santangelo, who has advised the company since 2017: Alex Katz landscapes, paintings by Robert Peterson, commissions from Orit Fuchs and Doodle Boy, rotating Maroon Bells photography by Bob Tabor in the lobby. Self-guided tours let guests work through it, and there is a partnership with Anderson Ranch Arts Center, sixty years into its life as a fixture of Colorado's art community. That is a real programme rather than a lobby installation.

Which makes the elephant business harder to forgive. A brass elephant head protrudes from the lobby desk; elephant knockers sit on the guestroom doors. In Nantucket the motif is heritage. In Aspen it is branding, and it undercuts the restraint EMBARC otherwise achieved. The signature restaurant, Lola 41, comes west too, with a new lounge, 41 Below \u2014 seafood and sushi along the 41st parallel, Japan to Nantucket. A sushi bar is not what Aspen lacks.

The inheritance being managed in Aspen is the brand's, not the building's.

Dallas, continued

At 176 rooms, 56 of them suites, the Stoneleigh is the largest of the three and the least like a boutique. Opened in 1923 and the city's second-oldest hotel, it has the Beaux-Arts bones and the Draper association, and Fettle's decision was to build on the Draper aesthetic rather than clear it. So: high-pile wool carpet, geometric wallcoverings, velvets, lacquered burl bar cabinets, seating drawn from 1930s silhouettes, art by the California set decorator Jack Lewis. Bathrooms get Venetian glass sconces from Sogni di Cristallo and a bespoke wallpaper with a gold key hidden in the pattern, inscribed with the hotel's S.

Bar Leonessa sits behind floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains with an onyx and marble bar and fringed lamps, playing the Prohibition card. Lion's Den, named for the stone lions at the Maple Street entrance, centres on a quatrefoil banquette under oversized swing-arm lamps. Outside, the pool has been reworked in coral and green with Italian parasols and a DJ booth, which is a choice.

But the eleventh floor is the reservation worth chasing: five signature suites plus the original music room, dining room and library, and the Draper Suite, whose bed canopy is made in Oscar de la Renta fabric. Above it, the twelfth-floor penthouse \u2014 once used by Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn \u2014 has one of the largest terraces in the city. Book the eleventh floor or book somewhere else.

Jackson, quietly

The most convincing of the three is also the smallest. Alpine House has 20 rooms in downtown Jackson, founded by former US Olympians Hans and Nancy Johnstone \u2014 Nordic combined in 1988, biathlon in 1992 \u2014 and it has been reworked by Brooklyn's Elizabeth Roberts Architects. It is the studio's first hotel and first project in Wyoming, and the residential instinct shows: vintage and reupholstered furniture, Pendleton textiles, no two rooms alike. Richard Ampudia, a founder of New York's La Esquina, runs the food at The Kitchen, with local sourcing and, per the hotel, European influences \u2014 a brief that sounds unresolved on paper and will live or die on execution. Guests also get access to the Anvil Hotel and Glorietta Trattoria, where Remle Colestock cooks.

Roberts says the best compliment her team received was guests asking whether the building had originally been a private house. Every hotel in this group is chasing that sentence. Only one of them earned it by not trying.