Few buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue carry as much civic weight as the Old Post Office, completed in 1899 to designs by Willard Freeborn and later associated with the Romanesque Revival hand of James Windrim — its clock tower, at 315 feet, still the second tallest structure in the capital. What the Waldorf Astoria Washington D.C. had to solve when it opened in 2016 was how to introduce genuine luxury into a building whose bones are emphatically federal: the great glazed atrium, with its exposed steel diagonal bracing finished in gold, was never meant to be a hotel lobby. Architect Shalom Baranes led the conversion, working within a structure that the National Park Service listed and protected, while interior designer Dayna Lee of Forchielli Glidden brought in a palette of navy, champagne, and gilt that speaks to the building's governmental grandeur without collapsing into pastiche. The atrium's bar, visible in the images, deploys a deep-patterned blue carpet and velvet sofas beneath cascading crystal chandeliers, the original riveted ironwork arching overhead as an unimpeachable historical counterpoint to the hotel furniture below. Guest rooms range between two registers: some feature gilded Baroque bedframes with carved crests and navy damask drapery, while others take a lighter Federal tone — canopied four-posters in cream linen, arched windows, brass swing-arm lamps — the 263 rooms collectively building a portrait of Washington at its most self-consciously ceremonial.

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