When the watch and leather goods brand Shinola decided to open a hotel on Woodward Avenue in the heart of downtown Detroit, the brief was essentially about belief — belief that a consumer brand rooted in American craft could translate into architecture without becoming a theme park of itself. The Shinola Hotel, which opened in 2019 across a cluster of five historic buildings including the Singer Building and the T.B. Rayl Co. structure, was designed by architecture firm Kraemer Design Group with interiors by Roman and Williams, the New York studio behind the Ace Hotel New York and Viceroy Santa Monica. The exterior rendering visible here shows new construction in dark red brick with arched upper-floor windows deliberately echoing Detroit's early-twentieth-century commercial vocabulary — a ten-storey tower rising behind the rehabilitated low-rise streetwall, rooftop plantings softening the new addition's profile above Woodward. Inside, Roman and Williams brings the warmth and materiality the studio has made its signature: white oak platform beds with clean joinery, Pendleton-style wool blankets in rust and navy stripes, black rotary telephones on open-shelf nightstands. The restaurant floor uses a bold diamond-pattern terrazzo in deep red and cream, channeled banquettes and amber globe pendants referencing the brasserie tradition without replicating it. The conservatory bar — glass-vaulted, planted densely with hanging ferns and monstera — is the hotel's most theatrical space, its black-and-white geometric terrazzo floor grounding an interior that tilts generously toward the horticultural.

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