Developers are converting historic buildings into boutique hotels and resorts, preserving original architecture while adding modern hospitality amenities. Properties reopening under this model include The Flat Iron Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, a 1926 structure that once housed WWNC Radio, and TWA Hotel at New York’s JFK Airport, built within Eero Saarinen’s 1962 terminal. Hotel Emma in San Antonio occupies the former Pearl Brewery brewhouse, while Saint John’s Resort in Ohio operates within a 200-acre former Catholic seminary.
Adaptive reuse allows developers to add lodging capacity in dense urban cores without new construction. Buildings account for roughly 42 percent of global carbon emissions, making preservation-based hotel projects an alternative to ground-up development. Office-to-residential conversions already represent about 38 percent of approximately 147,000 adaptive reuse housing units in the United States, and hotel operators are applying similar approaches to meet demand while retaining historic structures…