Adaptive hospitality: identifying design strategies in the adaptive reuse of historic buildings as boutique hotels

Downtown revitalization has been at the forefront of many cities’ goals in the United States. Adaptive reuse of existing buildings is a crucial factor in this process by highlighting the uniqueness and identity of a place, maintaining the local sense of community, and differentiating it from the rest of the city. More and more historic structures are being adapted to boutique hotels in downtowns and becoming part of the main attraction of a city. The hospitality industry has recognized that there are a significant number of people that are looking for a different experience than traditional hotels can offer. Hotel chains and independent owners have turned to historic preservation and adaptive reuse to cover the needs of this market. Often the opportunities that adaptive reuse provides to a city are overlooked in favor of new structures, or if used there is no regard for the historic fabric of the building. The growing market of the boutique hotel industry and, the efforts to revitalize downtowns across the country, makes it necessary for a study that highlights the different possibilities in the creation of this type of hotel in a historic setting. This research focuses on identifying the different types of design strategies applied in the adaptive reuse of historic properties into boutique hotels. It also looks at how they provide the user experience associated with a historic-design boutique hotel and, how they incorporated the character-defining features into this design. The study examines the adaptive reuse of five historic-design boutique hotels in the state of North Carolina as case studies. Four successfully qualified for preservation tax credits. A database of historic-design boutique hotels in the state of North Carolina was created for this study, which had to comply with specific criteria to be eligible as samples. Archival research was then conducted using the Historic Preservation Tax Credit Applications to understand better what were the retained features and what changed. Site visits and a visual analysis were the final steps to understand the main reasons for change, the patterns found, and how they incorporated the boutique element