When Asa Griggs Candler — the man who turned Coca-Cola into an empire — commissioned Atlanta's first steel skyscraper in 1906, he asked architects George Stewart and George E. Murphy to clad it in something that would last. They chose Georgia marble, pressing it into Beaux-Arts and Neo-Renaissance ornament so dense and confident that the building still reads as an act of civic ambition more than a century later. The Candler Hotel Atlanta, which completed its adaptive reuse in October 2019, operates 265 rooms across those seventeen stories while preserving the structure's original Tiffany windows, grand marble staircase, and the swirling grey-veined columns that now define the ground-floor restaurant and bar — surfaces no contemporary budget could replicate and no sensitive designer would dream of concealing. Interior designer Nicole Hollis navigated the project's central challenge well: how to furnish a building of such material weight without either competing with it or retreating entirely into period pastiche. The answer arrived in the guestrooms as cane-panel headboards with black lacquered frames, dark floral drapery, herringbone carpet in charcoal, and pale wainscoting that flatters the proportions without mimicking the original era. Downstairs, encaustic-patterned cement tiles at the bar floor hold their own against those Ionic-capped marble columns, while leather banquettes and white-topped bistro tables keep the dining room grounded in the present. The building's National Register listing guaranteed the bones would survive; Hollis ensured the result feels inhabited rather than preserved.

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