Ornate and original to the building, Hotel Saint Louis’ golden elevator doors are a cynosure of its design, in addition to the numerous fleur-de-lis decorative motifs, the rotary phones on guest-room floors, and the numbers ‘705’ etched into the elevator floors—a reference to the building’s address (705 Olive).
Next up, the hotel will unveil its rooftop bar FORM Skybar on March 4. SPACE Architecture assisted in the creation of the 16th floor bar, which features large chandeliers, a menu from Matt Birkenmeier, and large, openable windows that give an almost bird’s-eye view of Busch Stadium.
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The hotel itself opened late last year. In entirety, the $68 million renovation from Amrit and Amy Gill’s Restoration St. Louis combines classic elegance with touches of modern luxury.
“This is one of the first skyscrapers in the world,” Gill says of the 186,617-square-foot building. “So they didn’t really know how to build one. It was like, ‘How do you build an elevator that tall? ‘How do you build a building that tall?’ ‘And what’s going to happen?’ ‘It can’t fall down so we have to reinforce it.’ Because they didn’t know, they had no experience, everything was—”
“—way overbuilt,” says Nathan Zierer, of Checkmate Design, who spearheaded the architectural design. “The columns here could probably support twice the size of this building. They’re massively oversized.”
Built in 1892, the team’s first challenge was to carve a hotel out of what once was an office building. “Office buildings don’t need ice rooms…laundry facilities… so designing around those spaces presented a challenge,” says Johnson.
For the team, renovating a building as old as the 208-foot-tall Union Trust Building was like looking inside an emperor’s tomb—you never know what gems are hidden within. Among the team’s finds were original plasterwork (replicated and now displayed in the hotel), a table-sized piece of original stained glass buried in the ceiling, and the discovery that the oddly angled walls in all four corners of the building were chimneys used to heat the floors during the original construction of the building.
The team paid homage to Louis Sullivan by replicating many of his original elements, such as the grand entrance that was remade out of cast stone. Others are originals, such as the exterior’s terra-cotta lion heads and trim, and stonework in front of each floor’s elevators, including Tennessee marble. The team read news articles from the day the building opened, which led to the discovery that the lobby was originally two-stories, not one.
For the hotel’s interior, Eiler took Gill’s “hipstoric” branding as a starting point. “When you think of St. Louis, you think of blue and gold. If you look at the hotel, you’re going to see a common thread throughout, which is that blue, that St. Louis blue. It’s in the interior, it’s in the furniture, it’s in the carpet, the guest rooms.”
Gill estimates that Beanblossom spent 10 days finding the right blue velvet.
“I was drowning in it,” she says.
The team highlighted the building’s architecture and Sullivan’s signature patterns.
“We have these great architectural details. Chelsea and I wanted to contrast that. To me, that creates interest. If it’s all the same thing, I think it becomes a little mundane,” Eiler says.
The two made sure that the custom furniture—like the lower-lobby’s Bernhardt tables—wouldn’t fight with the hotel’s architecture, keeping it classic and sophisticated.
The hotel also boasts the work of local makers, from the upstairs TROCO steel high-beam tables to other tables built by Missouri Table, paintings from local artist Andy Cross, photographs by Jim Corbett, the lobby’s stained glass panels completed by artist Adam Johnson, and portraits of iconic St. Louisans by artist Fern Taylor.
Even though the hotel has been open since December 20, 2018, the team’s touch on the space continues—as they walk through the lobby, Eiler and Beanblossom can’t help but adjust a few table decorations.
“It’s funny to me. I think about Louis Sullivan, and I think about how nervous he was, because it was one of the first skyscrapers,” says Gill. “They didn’t know, and they didn’t have any experience. Then I look at Nathan, who’s a young architect, and he’s nervous because he’s working on one of the 30 Louis Sullivan buildings left in the world. So I’ve had a lot of really great nervous architects.”
