Shinola Hotel

Perhaps no city in the United States is as famous for its precipitous decline as Detroit — the decline of the American auto industry hit it like a natural disaster, turning whole neighborhoods into post-apocalyptic ghost towns. But where there’s a low, there’s an opportunity to rise up, and today Detroit is also famous for the urban revitalization that’s currently in full swing. It’s a story that’s intimately bound up with the rise of the Detroit-based Shinola, a retailer selling watches, bicycles, and lifestyle products manufactured largely in America. And to this story we can add another tangible improvement that Shinola has made to downtown Detroit: the Shinola Hotel.

For this project the watchmaker brought in plenty of outside expertise, from Gachot Studios and Kraemer Design Group to New York’s NoHo Hospitality Group. The result is a stylish, youth-oriented boutique hotel that plays up its historical heritage, its interiors recalling an idealized version of Detroit’s manufacturing heyday. It’s not just a lodging, but a social space as well, or more precisely several social spaces: its 16,000 square feet of dining, entertainment, and retail space include Sam Morello, an Italian restaurant, and will soon add a cocktail bar, a beer hall, a café, and a number of local and national retailers. It’s put its corner of Detroit back on the map in a big way, in one fell swoop.