Architecture With A Past

By AHL Editorial Team on 09.18.26

Who doesn’t love a second chance, or even a third? In the ultimate examples of adaptive re-use, these hotels took the good bones they were born with and ran with it. Whether the footprint is the same, the architecture is repurposed from a former life, they’ve housed guests for generations, or just the spirit of its history remains, we fell for these spots where renovation is only part of the story.  Through some of our favorite reviews and newly discovered properties — from a hacienda, a warehouse, a farm that’s belonged to one family for two centuries, an Art Deco office tower — we’re looking at buildings that have grown with the times and became timeless in the process.

ON OUR RADAR

OMNI MOUNT WASHINGTON RESORT & SPA
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire

WHY WE WANT TO BOOK IT: Charles Alling Gifford designed the Mount Washington Hotel in a Y-shape wide enough to need 2,000 doors and 12,000 windows, and brought in 250 Italian stonemasons just for the granite and stucco. That was 1902. A 2026 renovation kept the Renaissance Revival shell, with the same red roof and wraparound veranda, and rebuilt what’s under it, including the Presidential Wing’s 69 rooms and the Main Dining Room, where the delegates who signed the Bretton Woods Agreement once sat. The rooftop Observatory Bar is new. The 800,000 acres of national forest around it are not. Check it out before you check in.

PENDRY CHICAGO
Chicago, Illinois

WHY WE WANT TO BOOK IT: The building is the Carbide & Carbon, a 1929 Art Deco tower the Burnham brothers dressed in black granite, green terra cotta, and gold leaf, styled after what Chicago lore still calls a Prohibition-era champagne bottle. Pendry moved in below the roofline in 2021, twenty-four floors down from Château Carbide, the rooftop bar that inherited the building’s legend rather than needing to build one of its own. Go for a golden-hour Aperol spritz over Michigan Avenue, or the weekend DJ sets that keep the terrace loud past dark. Check it out before you check in.

WHY WE LOVED OUR STAY

HÔTEL DUC DE SAINT-SIMON
Paris, France

The townhouse dates to the 18th century, but the foundation is older — breakfast is served in what used to be a medieval dungeon. Rooms run French Antique & Floral, heavy on the actual antiques, and the courtyard behind the big wooden entry doors still does what courtyards were built to do, buffering the street from everyone inside. Read our full review. 

CHAPTER ROMA
Rome, Italy

WHY WE LOVE IT: The building is late-1800s neoclassical, in Regola, and designer Tristan du Plessis left the walls looking like it, with exposed brick and vaulted ceilings and a century of imperfections nobody plastered over. Raw steel and brass cut against the old masonry through all 42 rooms, and the bar runs under Roman arches sheathed in steel, doubling as a workspace before the cocktails start. Read our full review.

HOTEL SEVILLA
Mérida, Mexico

WHY WE LOVE IT: A 16th-century hacienda, one block from Plaza Grande, that spent most of its life as a private residence before Zeller & Moye and Salomón Sacal got to it. They kept the original stone floors and tropical wood ceilings and dropped in sweeping concrete forms and a sculptural spiral staircase, setting old and new next to each other rather than blending them. Twenty-one rooms carry that same contrast through black ceramic floors and henequen textiles against the period shutters. Read our full review.

HOTEL WILLIAM GRAY
Montreal, Canada

WHY WE LOVE IT: Two buildings here predate 1800 — Edward-William Gray built them himself around 1785, one a warehouse and auction house, the other his own residence. Both survived a 1968 fire and came back essentially unchanged, which is why they carry historic monument status today. The glass tower on top isn’t hiding that history, just adding a floor plan the 18th century didn’t need. Read our full review.

THE MAKER
Hudson, New York

WHY WE LOVE IT: Three separate historic buildings, restored rather than replaced, are now connected by one landscaped courtyard that ties together eleven rooms and a restaurant, library, lounge, and café. Mapos, the architecture firm behind it, brought in local fabricators and artists for the finish work, so the building reads like something that grew this way rather than something renovated into it. Read our full review. 

SÃO LOURENÇO DO BARROCAL
Monsaraz, Portugal

WHY WE LOVE IT: The same family has owned this farm for over two hundred years, and Pritzker winner Eduardo Souto de Moura didn’t build around that history, he converted it. The old olive press is now a living room with a bar, the cowshed has become the restaurant, and the agricultural outbuildings serve as guest houses, spread across twenty-two rooms, two suites, and sixteen cottages, all in whitewashed stone that was doing farm work a decade ago. Read our full review. 

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