Hotel Washington
- Architect
- Carrère and Hastings
- Style
- Beaux-Arts
- City
- Washington, DC
- Collection
- the city beautiful
The Hotel Washington opened on April 4, 1918, at 515 15th Street NW, a ten-story Beaux-Arts hotel designed by Carrère and Hastings -- the only commercial building the prominent New York firm built in Washington, D.C. Its facade is decorated in cream-colored sgraffito ornament scratched into a reddish-brown ground.
the building
Sgraffito facade. The exterior is finished in sgraffito, a technique of scratching a design through a top layer of plaster to reveal a contrasting color beneath, producing cream-colored ornament on a reddish-brown ground across all ten stories.
the style
Carrère and Hastings, best known for grand public and institutional commissions, gave the Hotel Washington a Beaux-Arts treatment -- their only commercial building in the city.
More on Beaux-Artsthe architect
Carrère and Hastings, the New York firm of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, designed the Hotel Washington as their sole commercial commission in Washington, D.C.
significance
The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 and is a contributing property to both the Financial Historic District (listed 2006) and the Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site. In 2005, George H. W. Bush, Barbara Bush, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver held a press conference at the hotel to unveil The Extra Mile, a mile-long stretch of bronze medallions honoring volunteerism along 15th Street.
nearby
- Willard InterContinental Washington
- National Metropolitan Bank
- Chase's Theater and Riggs Building
- Treasury Department
- Westory Building
- Commercial National Bank