Graduate Berkeley

It’s hard to describe what the Graduate hotels are up to without making them sound kitschy, but in hospitality, concept is only part of the package — the delight is often in the details, and in the execution, and it’s there that the Graduates distinguish themselves. This one, a block from the University of California’s Berkeley campus, has plenty of fun with its concept, though; the fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones was a professor as well, and the Graduate Berkeley imagines what he might have done with a 144-room 1928-vintage hotel on Durant Avenue, a block off of Telegraph.

That explains the lobby’s vast collection of National Geographic magazines, and the eclectic décor more generally — it looks collected rather than designed, and neither modernism nor minimalism makes much of an appearance. The rooms are unfussy but not spartan, and they’re far more comfortable than student digs. And the public spaces are where the Graduate really shines; this is a convivial place, with a lively lobby scene and a restaurant, Henry’s, that updates classic pub fare for Berkeley, which is, thanks to Alice Waters, the spiritual home of farm-to-table cooking. (Coming soon: an outpost from Tartine, the much-loved San Francisco bakery.)