Casco Viejo, Panama City's UNESCO-listed colonial quarter, has been fighting its own erasure for decades — a neighborhood of crumbling republican-era mansions and forgotten plazas slowly reclaimed by developers and idealists in roughly equal measure. The American Trade Hotel, which took over a restored 1917 building facing Plaza Herrera when it opened in 2013, belongs firmly in the idealist camp. The project came from Ace Hotel — then at the height of its cultural influence — working with Roman and Williams on the interiors, and the result is exactly what you'd hope from that pairing: a five-floor, 50-room property that wears its history without being consumed by it. The facade's white plasterwork, arched balconies, and dark hip roof carry the building's early twentieth-century Canal Zone character intact, glowing warmly against the Casco skyline at dusk. Inside, Roman and Williams balanced preservation instincts against their signature layering of periods and textures. Encaustic cement tiles in indigo and cream pattern the restaurant and bar floors — a direct reference to the Cuban and Spanish colonial influences threaded through Panamanian vernacular architecture. Guestrooms pair walnut headboards and dark-stained wide-plank floors with articulated swing-arm lamps in the Bestlite tradition and indigo block-print cushions, the atmosphere closer to a well-edited Panama City apartment than to conventional hotel design. Upper-floor rooms frame panoramic views across the Casco rooftops toward the Pacific, binoculars left casually on the writing desk suggesting the hotel knows exactly where its guests will want to look.

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