Hotels on college campuses have become a popular niche in recent years, with dedicated brands targeting the academic market. In late fall, Study Hotels opened its fourth college-based property: the Study at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The development is the first—and, so far, only—hotel on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus.
The brand, said Paul McGowan, president and founder of both Hospitality 3 and Study Hotels, looks to reflect each community and university on which they have an asset to give visitors a true sense of place. “Visitors to our hotel are getting more than a hotel experience,” he said. “They're actually experiencing the university and all the culture and other offerings that exist in these markets.” By placing the hotels on or directly adjacent to campuses, the brand helps immerse guests in everything the university has to offer, he added.
Johns Hopkins, meanwhile, was making a “tremendous effort” to establish a “core” of the Homewood campus, McGowan recalled. “The University had made a lot of improvements in the neighborhood and roadways and they were seeking a place of accommodation that would meet their needs going forward.”
The university reached out to the Study Hotels team to determine what would be a good fit for the site, which had a historic apartment building ready for adapting and would be across the street from a new student center. “We chose to maintain the integrity and purpose of the existing building,” McGowan said, noting that the adaptive reuse would require “a pretty significant intervention” to create the kind of hotel the development team and the university wanted.
Adapting and Reusing
As the project kicked off, the team made “major structural improvements” to the lower floors of the building. They opened up the first floor and connected it to the second where the property’s meeting rooms are. “[We] created this volume of space [with] large windows that allow people within the hotel to feel connected to the energy of the campus and Charles Village,” McGowan said. Likewise, the developers wanted people walking by to see and “experience the positive energy in the hotel.”
McGowan acknowledged that adapting a century-old building “required a bit more work,” but it was “worth the investment” to maintain the history and heritage of the structure. “Our goal was to [be] consistent with the vocabulary of the location, and Baltimore in particular,” he said, adding that the team “embraced” the brick composition “accented” with precast components
The team did encounter a number of “surprises” along the way, McGowan added. For example, construction methods that were common 100 years ago may not be as precise as what architects use today. “So a column that starts vertical in one location, by the time it gets to the seventh or eighth floor, may not be precisely in line or the same size as one below,” he said. The team also found “things that needed to be adjusted, reinforced, maybe done slightly different[ly] than we thought originally.”
All of this is normal for an adaptive-reuse project, he said. “The alternative is … demolishing a building and building something new—which has its benefits, but you take in a different set of parameters and a different set of constraints in that planning process. What I like, from my experience, about adaptive-reuse projects is that it forces you to be that much more creative.” Working with an existing space encourages architects and designers to create more unique spaces than they might otherwise have considered, he added, and can help create “a more grounded, more authentic, more intimate guest experience.”
The Study at Johns Hopkins
Location
Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus
Opening
2024
Number of Rooms
115
General Manager
Kathleen Dombrowski
Owner
Study Baltimore Holding
Management Company
Study Hotels