Best hotels in Des Moines | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Des Moines

Des Moines tends to surprise people who arrive expecting the generic Midwest grid. The downtown core is unusually coherent — a walkable concentration of early twentieth-century commercial architecture, the glass-and-steel skywalks threading between buildings, and the gold-domed Iowa State Capitol presiding over the east side with genuine civic authority. The city has invested seriously in its public realm over the past two decades: the Principal Riverwalk along the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers, the sculpture-heavy Western Gateway Park designed by Hargreaves Associates, and a warehouse district slowly converting light industrial buildings into galleries and restaurants. For a city of its size, the architectural range is quietly impressive, and the downtown retains the kind of human-scaled density that rewards walking. That downtown coherence makes the Hotel Fort Des Moines the obvious and well-justified place to anchor a visit. The building dates to 1919, designed in the neoclassical commercial style that defined American city hotels of that era, and its fifteen floors made it the tallest building in Iowa at the time of its opening. The Curio Collection designation from Hilton means it operates as an independent-feeling property with its own identity rather than a branded box, and the interior holds onto enough of the original detailing — coffered ceilings, brass fixtures, the grand lobby proportions — to communicate genuine history rather than performed nostalgia. It sits at the corner of Tenth and Walnut, close enough to the skywalk system to be practical in winter, and within a short walk of the Des Moines Art Center's remarkable campus, where additions by I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, and Richard Serra's studio work collectively form one of the more undervisited architectural sequences in the American Midwest. At $169 a night, the Hotel Fort Des Moines offers something that the convention-district hotels nearby simply cannot: a sense of accumulated time in a city that is still, in many ways, figuring out its design identity. Des Moines is not a place people typically put on a list beside Chicago or Minneapolis, but its ambitions are real, its public investments are visible, and its downtown has more architectural texture than its reputation suggests. The Fort, as it's locally known, is the right building to sleep in while you work that out for yourself.