12 Historic Structures Reimagined as Extraordinary Hotels
Prisons, sugar mills, classified war offices—the most striking stays prove that great architecture earns its keep twice
Even the most skillfully reimagined building retains the echo of what it was first constructed to hold. Currants fermenting in concrete tanks along the Ionian. Secrets passing through oak-paneled corridors in Whitehall. Prayers rising toward frescoed ceilings in a Nice convent where sisters hauled their own stone.
What distinguishes the current generation of adaptive reuse is neither reverence nor restraint but dialogue. The most ambitious architects are no longer content retrofitting contemporary comfort into historic fabric—they’re engineering productive friction between eras, letting patina speak without silencing the present. Spanning prisons and palaces, monasteries and terminals, war offices and industrial ruins, these hotels excel at that unique compilation of contemporary convenience and dramatic heritage, dramatically displaying hidden paintings beneath plaster, original machinery too eloquent to remove, geometries that forced invention. These inspired stays offer a step back into time and an experience one won’t soon forget.
1. Four Seasons Cartagena | Colombia
One of this year’s most anticipated adaptive reuse projects weaves a 16th-century Franciscan cloister, the 1920s Beaux-Arts Club Cartagena, and the former Teatro Colón into a single property—a timeline of Colombian cultural ambition made habitable. Hidden frescoes emerged during renovation, their discovery reshaping entire spaces. François Catroux designed around them in what became the celebrated French interior designer’s final hospitality commission before he died in 2022. Bogotá-based Poli Mallarino grounded interiors through furniture and textiles drawn from local craft traditions, counterweighting Catroux’s European sensibility. The 131 rooms include 18 accommodations arranged around the original cloister courtyard, with arched windows and period ceilings intact. In the former Teatro Colón, rechristened the Ballroom de la Veracruz, a magnificent brick dome still presides over bold checkerboard flooring—performance space transformed into gathering space, theatrical memory preserved in the bones.
2. Dexamenes Seaside Hotel | Greece
When the Currants Crisis of 1910 collapsed Greece’s primary export market overnight, farmers pivoted to fermentation. At Kourouta Beach, someone built a winery so close to the water that ships could load directly via pipes extending onto the sand. A century later, two concrete blocks containing 40 storage tanks sat abandoned at the edge of the Ionian Sea—brutalism before anyone called it that. K-Studio preserved manholes and pipe fittings, scraped walls to reveal aggregate textures, then inserted minimal black-steel frameworks organizing each 320-square-foot suite. Polished terrazzo floors reference beach pebbles. Two original steel silos—the same ones that once fed pipes running to waiting ships—now host art installations and spa treatments.
3. Yangshuo Sugar House | China
The karst peaks of Yangshuo rise like calligraphy brushstrokes against the Li River. At their base, Vector Architects found a 1960s sugar mill and recognized in its socialist-era bones the same balance between man-made and natural verticality. The original brick warehouses and loading truss—the one that once swung cane onto waiting boats—occupy the complex’s spiritual center, flanked by new gabled structures in hollow concrete block that echo old masonry proportions without imitating vocabulary. Where the dock stood, an infinity pool now extends toward the landscape. The spa inhabits a repurposed molasses storage tank. Across the 113-room property, Horizontal Space Design threaded bamboo installations through double-height volumes while cave-like passages frame the peaks beyond.
4. Kruisherenhotel Maastricht | Netherlands
The monks who built this Gothic monastery between 1440 and 1520 were scribes—men who copied and bound books in yellow limestone chambers until the French Revolution expelled them in 1797. Two centuries of absence followed. When hotelier Camille Oostwegel finally intervened, he commissioned what remains Europe’s most uncompromising dialogue between medieval sacred architecture and contemporary design. Ingo Maurer’s copper tunnel entrance bathes arrivals in amber light before depositing them into a nave where Spencer’s restaurant floats on a mezzanine amid 15th-century frescoes, original stained glass still filtering Limburg daylight. Architects SATIJNplus developed the “box-in-box” principle: every contemporary insertion—glass elevators, concrete seating landscapes, climate systems—engineered to be fully reversible, leaving Mosan Gothic fabric untouched for future generations.
5. Hoshinoya Nara Prison | Japan
Architect Keijiro Yamashita studied 30 prisons across eight countries before designing this one. When the Meiji government commissioned five penitentiaries to international standards in 1908, Yamashita delivered Nara’s red-brick answer: cell blocks radiating from a central guard tower, the Haviland System’s panopticon layout representing Japan’s modernization ambitions. The prison operated continuously for nearly a century before its 2017 designation as an Important Cultural Property arrived just months after the last inmates departed—preservation and closure almost simultaneous. Hoshino Resorts’s conversion of Japan’s first prison-to-hotel transforms 48 solitary confinement cells into guest rooms while Azuma Architect & Associates threads contemporary comfort through structures engineered for deprivation. An adjacent museum contextualizes the carceral history under the framework “An Eternal Question Posed by an Iconic Prison.” Nara, Japan’s first permanent capital, houses temples dating to the 8th century; Hoshinoya adds a different kind of monument—to reform, to preservation, to the proposition that spaces designed for punishment might yet find redemption.
6. Umaid Bhawan Palace | India
Famine struck Jodhpur in 1928. Maharaja Umaid Singh’s response defied conventional relief—not grain shipments but a 15-year construction project employing 3,000 workers, converting catastrophe into wages and wages into a 347-room palace that remains among the world’s largest private residences. British architect Henry Vaughan Lanchester drew from Indo-Deco and Beaux-Arts vocabularies, cladding the structure in golden Chittar sandstone and the same Makrana marble that faced the Taj Mahal. Polish artist Stefan Norblin painted Art Deco murals throughout, figures frozen mid-gesture in rooms where the current Maharaja’s family still lives. The 1971 decision to open 70 rooms as a Taj Hotels property created something unusual: a royal residence, a museum, and a hotel operating under one roof. Guests swim in the subterranean Zodiac pool beneath Norblin’s brushwork, drink in the Trophy Bar surrounded by hunting relics, and occasionally glimpse the family whose ancestor looked at drought and saw opportunity.
7. The Warehouse Hotel | Singapore
Before becoming a cool hotel, this address had a vast (and somewhat sordid) history: Spice warehouse, 1895; opium den and secret society clubhouse, early 1900s; illegal whiskey distillery on a street the Hokkien called “Chiu Long Lo” (Spirits Shed Street); Singapore’s most legendary disco, from 1986 to 1996. Then two decades of silence before Lo & Behold Group acquired the triple-peaked godown on Robertson Quay. The resurrection enlisted an entirely Singaporean creative team: Zarch Collaboratives preserved the symmetrical facade and original roof trusses; Asylum founder Chris Lee designed interiors where machinery-inspired pulleys dangle from 46-foot ceilings and exposed brick meets copper wall panels. Each of the 37 rooms—30 percent larger than typical Singapore accommodation—contains a “Minibar of Vices” stocked according to sin. Pó restaurant serves Mod-Sin cuisine; the bar pours cocktails inspired by each era of the building’s checkered past.
8. Hotel Marcel | Connecticut
In 2018, it was voted Connecticut’s ugliest building. By 2022, the same Marcel Breuer brutalist landmark had become America’s first Passive House-certified hotel and its first to achieve net-zero energy operation. Bruce Becker bought the former Armstrong Rubber Company headquarters from IKEA for $1.2 million in 2019. Breuer’s distinctive mass—a five-story office block hovering above a two-story research facility, separated by a 17-foot void—remains intact, its muscular concrete now powered by over 1,000 rooftop solar panels generating 600,000 kilowatt-hours annually. Dutch East Design deliberately softened what Connecticut voters found hostile: warm walnut, handmade terracotta, Anni Albers textiles. Each of the 165 rooms contains a Breuer-designed Cesca chair. Outside, the 48-foot concrete sign Breuer created still announces a company that no longer exists.
9. Raffles London at The OWO | England
For 117 years, the public never set foot inside 57 Whitehall. What happened behind William Young’s 1906 Edwardian Baroque facade stayed behind it—Winston Churchill orchestrating Allied victory, MI5 and MI6 taking shape in shadowed corridors, Ian Fleming imagining a spy named Bond while serving as a naval intelligence officer. Converting the Old War Office into Raffles’s first UK property took eight years, 37 heritage consultants, and roughly $1.9 billion. EPR Architects and the late Thierry Despont excavated six stories beneath the existing structure while restoring 2.5 miles of oak-paneled corridors above. The Haldane Suite encompasses Churchill’s former office, red damask walls, and a replica desk. Guerlain’s first London spa occupies four subterranean floors.
10. Hôtel du Couvent | France
The sisters of Sainte-Claire built this convent themselves beginning in 1604, hauling stone and repurposing timber from a neighboring chateau. Four centuries later, hotelier Valéry Grégo—behind Paris’s Le Pigalle and Saint-Raphaël’s Les Roches Rouges—undertook a decade-long, $113 million resurrection, treating monastic austerity as luxury’s highest form. Studio Mumbai’s Bijoy Jain, whose practice champions historical construction as future-proof design, collaborated with Studio Méditerranée on architecture; Festen’s Hugo Sauzay and Charlotte de Tonnac furnished interiors with flea market finds from Bologna and Parma, including a 16th-century monastery table now anchoring the main restaurant. Resident herbalist Gregory Unrein compounds remedies from terraced gardens, reviving the convent’s centuries-old apothecary tradition. Bread emerges daily from the original bakery. Below ground, a subterranean Roman bath complex—tepidarium, caldarium, frigidarium—channels the contemplative rigor the Clarisses would recognize.
11. Pendry Natirar | New Jersey
Consider the deed history: From Quaker oil heiress to convalescent home for “deserving gentlewomen” to the King of Morocco. Kate Macy Ladd—granddaughter of a Nantucket whaler whose firm became New York’s first oil refinery before selling to Standard Oil—commissioned Boston architect Guy Lowell to design this 33,000-square-foot Tudor mansion in 1912, naming it Natirar after the Raritan River spelled backward. She opened Maple Cottage for working women recovering from illness; philanthropy was encoded in the property’s DNA from the start. In 1983, at Malcolm Forbes’s urging to block developers, King Hassan II purchased the estate for $7.5 million, but never visited. His son inherited it; Somerset County acquired it four years later for $22 million. Developer Bob Wojtowicz spent two decades converting royal indifference into Pendry’s first countryside property. CosciaMoos Architecture added a 66-room wing; DesignAgency preserved the mansion’s limestone foyer and linenfold paneling. The 19,000-square-foot Spa Pendry descends via sculptural staircase, Moroccan tilework nodding to the estate’s royal interregnum.
12. TWA Hotel | New York
Eero Saarinen died at 51, months before his TWA Flight Center opened in 1962. He never witnessed passengers ascending through thin-shell concrete wings, never saw sunlight pour through 486 custom window panels onto terrazzo floors, never heard the Solari split-flap departure board—the same board that now announces cocktail specials rather than gate changes. TWA’s 2001 bankruptcy left the terminal mothballed for 18 years. Beyer Blinder Belle’s $265 million rejuvenation returned Saarinen’s masterpiece to public life, but as a lobby rather than a gateway, with 512 rooms now orbiting what was once the threshold to the sky. Lubrano Ciavarra’s two seven-story wings curve behind the landmark, their four-inch soundproof windows shielding guests from runway noise while the headhouse commands attention. Rooms furnished with Womb chairs and Tulip tables channel original interiors. On the rooftop, an infinity pool overlooks active taxiways where jets still queue for takeoff. .