Girard Corinthian columns of Vermont marble rising forty feet from Broad Street announce a building that was never designed to be a hotel — the former Girard Bank, completed in 1847 by architect Thomas U. Walter in the Greek Revival mode, its domed rotunda modeled closely on the Pantheon in Rome. That rotunda is now the beating heart of The Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia, converted in 2000 by architects Bower Lewis Thrower, its soaring marble drum lined with Ionic columns, wrought-iron mezzanine balconies, and a central bar that holds its own against the scale of the room with remarkable composure. The lounge furniture — circular banquettes in dove grey, low-slung club chairs, crystalline chandelier clusters suspended on armillary sphere frames — introduces warmth without diminishing the architecture's civic gravity. The 299 guestrooms are housed in an adjacent tower and carry a quieter register: tufted leather headboards in champagne bronze, Greek key motifs on accent cushions and carpet borders, grasscloth feature walls in warm tan, and brass-framed glass desks that echo the building's neoclassical vocabulary at an intimate scale. French doors divide the larger suites into sleeping and sitting zones, with brass-trimmed coffee tables in antiqued mirror and wingback chairs upholstered in natural linen completing the picture. The dining room, set within a former banking chamber, pairs dark parquet floors and velvet damask chairs in deep navy with spherical crystal-and-iron chandeliers — a contemporary layer applied to a space that still carries the solemnity of its original purpose.

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