Graduate State College

The central Pennsylvanian town of State College is, sensibly enough, the home of Penn State University, and Graduate State College is the local branch of the Graduate hotel group, whose boutique hotels reliably take their inspiration from the campuses they serve, and present to guests an idealized version of the collegiate life. In this case, they took the old-fashioned Atherton Hotel, set two blocks from Penn State’s expansive campus, and transformed it into a contemporary boutique hotel — one that’s dressed in Nittany Lions livery and filled to the brim with subtle and not-so-subtle references to the university’s history and identity.

Rooms are decked out in the school’s familiar blue and white, and furnished with comforts that are a cut above the ordinary campus-adjacent hotel. They’re playful but not quite gimmicky — and the same can be said of the hotel’s bookish Trophy Room, as well as the Trophy Room restaurant, which really comes to life during football season (and on the weekend of the annual THON fundraiser). Stylish enough for students, traditional enough for parents, and comfortable (and dignified) enough for visiting professors — that’s the Graduate brand in a nutshell.