The Alan

Manchester’s wealth of charmingly distressed red-brick warehouses makes the city an urban renewer’s dream. The building that’s now home to the Alan is a listed landmark, but it took some restoring to bring its brickwork, its 19th-century architectural details, and its towering ex-industrial spaces front and center. (Relics of this reclamation are visible in the terrazzo flooring, a jumble of would-be discards from previous rounds of stonework.)

Stripped down to its bare brick, the Alan, today, is as stylish as they come, leaning all the way in to Manchester’s unique visual heritage. It’s also as modern as they come, in the sense that it’s more than a lodging. The ground-floor space is a restaurant, café, and bar all at once, and it’s as well suited to daytime co-working as it is for nighttime revelry.

And of course it’s not half bad as a lodging, either. The rooms mix rough post-industrial patina with Deco-like frills and some ultra-modern design gestures as well. The smallest ones are spartan but comfortable enough, with thoughtful touches like pour-over coffee and Bohea teas; higher up the scale they increase in size and loungeability, and the corner suites, with plentiful light through multiple windows, feel like proper loft apartments.