Traveler: Detroit’s Boutique Hotels

If stylish settings fuel your wanderlust, there’s no better city to park it in right now than Detroit, where destination hotels are a big part of the city’s comeback engine.

Inside the historic Wurlitzer Building, The Siren Hotel (from $159/night) lures visitors with panoramic rooftop views and vintage-tinged rooms. A giant disco ball in the lavishly pink Candy Bar lounge sets a showy stage for cocktails before dinner at Albena, if you can get a reservation. James Beard–nominated chef Garrett Lipar serves Great Lakes–inspired creations to just eight guests at a time at the tasting counter.

The yang to The Siren’s yin, the Shinola Hotel (from $245/night) has settled nicely into the former T.B. Rayl & Co. department store and an old Singer sewing-machine building after opening earlier this year. In keeping with Shinola luxury watch/bike/leathergoods brand’s M.O., handsome pieds-à-terre boast manly decor, period-appropriate patterned wallpapers, custom millwork, and Michigan craft beer in the minibars—some rooms even have Shinola turntables with classic vinyl to spin. Lauded New York chef Andrew Carmellini oversees a handful of on-site dining concepts, from classic Italian to fried chicken. Parker’s Alley, a boutique-loaded stretch behind Shinola, honors one of the city’s first African-American landowners, who purchased the plot where the hotel now sits.

In the former Detroit Fire Department headquarters, the Detroit Foundation Hotel (from $219/night) earns accolades for accents like iron-welded door handles and leather trays made by local artisans, and preserved firehouse features like airy high ceilings, glazed brick tile, and arched doorways. Michelin-starred chef Thomas Lents mans the Apparatus Room restaurant, and a complimentary car service chauffeurs guests around a 3-mile radius in a Lincoln Continental, if that’s how you roll.

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