In 2022, the Salamander Collection—then known as Salamander Hotels & Resorts—partnered with London-based private equity real estate manager Henderson Park to acquire the former Mandarin Oriental in Washington, D.C. The partners rebranded the hotel as the Salamander Washington D.C., marking the Salamander brand’s debut in the capital.
Under its new flag, the property remained open while its leadership team devised and launched a renovation to bring the hotel in line with the vision of Salamander brand founder Sheila Johnson.
Town and Country
Johnson opened the first Salamander-branded property in Middleburg, Va., in 2013, and within a few years, the leadership team realized that they could create a “town and country” concept if they could find the right asset in D.C. “We'd be able to serve our loyalists with another experience,” Salamander President Prem Devadas recalled, but acknowledged that finding the right urban property was tricky. “Part of what has made the [Middleburg] resort so successful is the various experiences that we have that are not just defined within four walls.”
Recreating those experiences in an urban footprint would be challenging, but the former Mandarin Oriental had what the team needed. The property, Devadas said, has an “unusual amount of space and amenities” that echoed the Middleburg hotel, “including a destination spa, indoor pool and fantastic fitness [center and] a club lounge area.” A key element was an outdoor garden that the team could renovate into a smaller version of the large lawn at the Middleburg property—“a place where we have so many outdoor events.”
The renovation began in December 2023 and wrapped ten months later with updates to the guestrooms and public spaces.
Expanded Wellness
If the bucolic Middleburg property is “a wellness-focused resort,” its D.C. counterpart is an urban variation of that theme, said Cristina Godospin, director of sales and marketing for the Salamander Washington D.C.
A significant part of that rebrand was expanding the hotel’s spa space from one level to two. Designed by Arch Amenities and Monogram at BBGM, the renamed Salamander Spa got a new entrance off the hotel’s updated Living Room. The upper level of the spa, which was adapted from the previous hotel’s office space, focuses on beauty treatments with four rooms dedicated to non-invasive cosmeceutical facials. The lower level has a further six treatment rooms for massages and body treatments.
Turning office space into treatment rooms was no small undertaking, said Nicole Colavito, director of spa and wellness at the hotel. The team installed additional soundproofing materials in between rooms and added flooring materials to minimize sound transfer between the levels. Adding the grand staircase between the two floors was its own challenge. “There was no hole in the floor to get between the two spaces,” she recalled. “So that was an incredible feat of engineering and skill … to design it and then implement the design.”
The spa also has a fitness center, a private movement studio, a men’s grooming lounge (developed in partnership with Groom Guy) and an indoor pool with views of the river and the cherry trees beyond. “We are, to my knowledge, one of the only hotels that have a pool like this in D.C, which you can see out,” Colavito said. “We're not encapsulated in a cave down in the basin of the hotel.”
Dogon
In the fall, the hotel opened its signature restaurant, the 140-seat Dōgon by Kwame Onwuachi. Onwuachi and Johnson had launched the Family Reunion food festival, Devadas said, and the restaurant developed as an extension of that partnership. “We've worked very closely together on design [and] the actual development of the restaurant through renovation, and then, of course, we leaned on Kwame for the development of the menu and all of the preparations and agreements.”
Designed by architectural firm Modellus Novus, which had worked on Onwuachi’s New York City venue Tatiana, the restaurant celebrates D.C. surveyor Benjamin Banneker and his connection to the West African Dogon people. The entrance has Kriskadecor metal chain curtains that reference Banneker’s Gunter’s Chains, a device he used to measure and survey the land. The restaurant’s color scheme of dark blue and silver are meant to evoke the night sky and the Dogon people’s history of astronomy.
Art and Design
The living room and lounge areas display artwork from Black American artists who have connections to Washington, D.C. Art Space NYC created a bas-relief piece on display behind the front desk, inspired by classic Greek art and depicting local landmarks including the national monument to the Martin Luther King, Jr.
“We tried to tell our story—throughout the hotel—through the art that we brought in,” Godospin said of the hotel’s visual aesthetic. Johnson herself curated a number of original art pieces that were placed throughout the property,
This article was originally published in the February/March edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.