Best hotels in Columbus | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Columbus

Columbus has long been underestimated as an architectural city, which is part of what makes it interesting. The Ohio state capital was laid out in 1812 on a grid that still gives downtown its confident, unhurried proportions, and the LeVeque Tower — completed in 1927 to designs by C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim — remains one of the finest Art Deco skyscrapers in the American Midwest. Hotel LeVeque, an Autograph Collection property occupying that building, trades on that provenance honestly: the lobby retains original detailing, and the rooms sit inside a tower whose gargoyles and terracotta ornament still draw your eye upward from the street. Staying here means waking inside a building that genuinely mattered when it was built, and still does. The Short North, running north from downtown along High Street, has been Columbus's arts and gallery corridor since the 1980s, and Graduate Columbus slots into that context with the kind of culturally referential design the Graduate brand has built its identity around — collegiate nostalgia filtered through a knowing, slightly irreverent visual lens. The neighborhood itself is walkable and dense with independent restaurants and design shops, which makes Graduate's mid-range positioning feel like good editorial judgment rather than a compromise. It's the right kind of hotel for a district that functions best when you spend most of your time outside it. The Junto, on the Scioto Peninsula, represents a different proposition entirely. The peninsula is a newer development zone on the west bank of the Scioto River, and The Junto — named for Benjamin Franklin's intellectual club, which gives some indication of its ambitions — occupies a purpose-built structure with river-facing orientation and a contemporary interior sensibility that reads as the most forward-looking of the three properties. Where LeVeque offers architectural heritage and Graduate offers neighborhood immersion, The Junto offers a Columbus that is still in the process of inventing itself, which has its own appeal. For a design-conscious traveler, the choice between them is less about quality — all three operate at a comparable tier — and more about which version of the city's timeline you want to inhabit: the 1927 tower, the arts-district street life of the last four decades, or the riverfront future currently being poured.