These properties transform guest rooms into galleries
Kimpton Cottonwood Hotel, Omaha
Once the Blackstone Hotel, this recently reimagined 106-year-old property is now named for Nebraska’s state tree, and its headboards will have guests dreaming of a walk in the woods. Designer and DLR Group principal Staci Patton collaborated with Valley Forge Fabrics on a textile that borrows from a woodcut of the Fontainebleau forest, which they found in a 19th-century French travel magazine. “The chinoiserie linen fabric evokes the pastoral, story-like mood of a picnic on the Blackstone lawn in the 1920s,” she says. The only thing missing is a picnic basket full of Reubens—a sandwich that was supposedly invented here during a 1925 poker game.
From $199, thecottonwoodhotel.com
Quirk Hotel Charlottesville
Following the success of the original Quirk Hotel in Richmond, the boutique brand (a part of Hyatt’s Destination Hotels) last year opened a sister property near the University of Virginia. Interior designer Patrick Gegen wanted the art to extend beyond the hotel’s gallery spaces. “The headboards were the perfect opportunity for the furniture to act as a canvas for a local artist,” he says. His choice of artist? Local painter Kiki Slaughter, who created a work inspired by the paint-splattered canvas tarps on her studio floors—what she calls “my beautiful mess.” The resulting pastel-splashed fabric calls to mind a Monet lily pond. “Its dream-like quality,” Slaughter says, “makes it fitting for a headboard.”
From $275, destinationhotels.com
Riggs Washington DC
Opened in 2019, this stately property just north of the National Mall occupies an 1891 Richardson Romanesque Revival bank building. “We conceived the rooms almost like a safe deposit box,” says designer and Lore Group creative director Jacu Strauss, “where the contents are much more personal and sentimental—a departure from more obvious bank themes.” For the upholstered headboards, Strauss teamed up with Voutsa head designer George Venson, who took inspiration from a 17th-century altarpiece by Mexican Baroque artist Cristóbal de Villalpando. Venson recreated the biblical figures’ billowing robes without context, and then reassembled them to make an abstract pattern that Strauss calls “playful, colorful, and theatrical.”
From $289, riggsdc.com
