Graduate Bloomington

For most hoteliers, college towns are a missed opportunity, or maybe just easy money — a captive audience and a few guaranteed periods of sky-high demand mean that most of them don’t try all that hard. But if you didn’t sleep through your economics classes, you might have learned that an irrational market presents an opportunity. It’s a lesson that the minds behind Graduate Hotels certainly learned, and the Graduate Bloomington, just off the west end of the Univiersity of Indiana campus, goes all out to make the grade.

Like the other Graduates in college towns across America, it’s full of personality, and painstakingly tailored to the particularities of its setting. Here that means paying plentiful tribute to the university’s basketball tradition — Larry Bird is the most famous Hoosier, but far from the only one — and décor that celebrates Indiana’s agricultural history even as it updates it for the boutique-hotel era.

The lobby contains vintage bleachers from courtside, and there are graphic nods to Indiana grad Will Shortz, the man who’s become synonymous with the New York Times crossword. And any day now they’ll draw open the curtain on Poindexter Coffee, serving breakfast sandwiches and pastries alongside the expected strong brew. (Not that kind of brew — local laws prohibit alcohol sales in this particular corner of downtown.)