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 rewards closer reading than its reputation suggests. The city's downtown core is a genuinely unusual piece of American urbanism, built out over decades through an ambitious skyway system that connects its mid-century civic architecture to a cluster of later corporate towers, all of it anchored by Eero Saarinen's 1982 Sculpture Garden at the Des Moines Art Center and a surprisingly serious collection of public art. The Art Center itself is a rare thing: a building added to by three architects across different eras, with the original Eliel Saarinen structure joined later by I.M. Pei and then Richard Meier, each addition maintaining its own material register without collapsing into pastiche. That willingness to hold architectural tension without resolving it too quickly tells you something about the city's instincts. The Hotel Fort Des Moines, part of Hilton's Curio Collection, sits at the center of this downtown and makes the most coherent case for staying here. The building dates to 1919, designed in a restrained Beaux-Arts manner that gave it an authority it has carried through various phases of the city's growth and occasional neglect. Its restoration brought back the high ceilings, the articulated masonry, and the lobby proportions that chain conversions so often sand down into something generic. At a nightly rate around $169, it positions itself as the considered option for anyone whose instinct is to notice materials and read buildings, rather than simply occupy a room. Downtown Des Moines has matured considerably since the early 2000s, with the East Village neighborhood just across the Des Moines River adding an independent grain of galleries, restaurants, and adaptive reuse projects that softens the corporate-civic weight of the core. The city's Principal Park and the restored Western Gateway area further reinforce a sense that Des Moines has been quietly and seriously building the infrastructure of a livable city rather than performing urban renewal for external validation. Coming in through the Fort Des Moines puts a traveler within walking distance of most of what the city does best, and the building itself, with its century of accumulated presence, functions as a reasonable counterweight to the assumption that the Midwest's smaller cities have nothing to say architecturally.