Hotels That Were Something Else First

A growing share of the most interesting hotels in the world were not built as hotels. Converting an existing structure imposes constraints that a new build never faces, and those constraints are usually why the result is memorable.

Why old buildings make good hotels

Pre-modern buildings were made for daylight and passive ventilation, because they had no alternative. Thick walls, deep reveals, high ceilings and cross-ventilation are exactly the qualities that make a room comfortable, and they are expensive to reproduce in new construction.

They also come with something no new building can manufacture: an existing relationship to their street and their city.

The recurring types

Monasteries and convents convert unusually well — cells become rooms, cloisters become courtyards, refectories become dining rooms, and the whole plan was already organised around quiet. Palazzi and townhouses offer grand public rooms downstairs and smaller rooms above, which maps neatly onto lobby and guest floors.

Industrial buildings — mills, silos, power stations, warehouses — provide the opposite: enormous single volumes with no internal divisions, which forces designers to insert new structures inside the old shell rather than subdivide it. Prisons have been converted too, which requires the most work to undo, since everything about the original was designed to be unpleasant.

The hard problems

Services are the main one. Running plumbing, ventilation and cabling through a protected structure without cutting into fabric that cannot be cut is the central technical challenge, and it is why conversions cost more per room than new build.

Then acoustics — masonry is good at blocking sound but old timber floors are not. Accessibility in buildings full of level changes. And heritage protection, which may prohibit altering the very windows that determine whether a room is habitable.

When it works and when it does not

The successful conversions keep the logic of the original legible and insert the new work as an obviously new layer. The unsuccessful ones sand away the difference until the building becomes a themed decoration of itself — the shell retained, the reason for the shell erased.