Bottleworks Hotel ★★★★

Two Million Bottles a Week, and Then Nothing for Decades

At its peak this building turned out more than two million bottles of Coca-Cola a week, which made it one of the largest glass bottling plants anywhere. Rubush and Hunter, the Indianapolis firm behind several of the city’s landmarks, gave it an Art Deco skin in 1931. Bottling stopped in 1964, the plant moved out to Speedway, and the place spent a long stretch belonging to the school district and then to nobody in particular. A five year restoration by Hendricks Commercial Properties brought it back as a hotel, and the restoration itself has been decorated by Indiana Landmarks. The guest floors sit above the old production halls.

Why It Works

Adaptive reuse is a crowded category and most of it is surface. Here the industrial history is the design, not a reference to it: the ceilings, the floors, the metalwork and the staircase all carry the story of what was made in the room. It earns the second look, and it has the ratings to match, holding a Michelin Key and an AAA Four Diamond. The other half of the argument is what the building sits in. Very few hotels of this size come with a food hall, a cinema and a bowling alley at the bottom of the stairs.

Why This Location

Massachusetts Avenue is the cultural spine of downtown Indianapolis, a diagonal street of theatres, galleries, bars and restaurants, and the hotel anchors its north end. That places you within a walk of the Mass Ave run itself and within a short one of the city centre, Monument Circle and the canal. For anyone in town for a game, a conference or a show, the practical advantage is that the evening does not require a car, and the building’s own venues cover the nights when the city does not.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium

• Vibe: Art Deco, industrial, sociable

• Rooms: Guest rooms and suites on the second and third floors of the old plant, each laid out to the building rather than to a template

• Best For: Architecture and design travellers, groups who want the night out downstairs, weekends in Indianapolis without a car

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: The gilded staircase, built to read like a soda fountain, under plaster ceilings swirled to look like fizz

• Dining: Coat Check Bar and Bottled Blonde in the hotel; The Garage food hall in the district alongside

• Amenities: Living Room Theaters cinema, Pins Mechanical duckpin bowling, animals accepted, Michelin Key, AAA Four Diamond

• Attractions: Massachusetts Avenue, downtown Indianapolis, Monument Circle, the canal walk

What the Restoration Kept

The detail is the reason to stay rather than to visit. Terrazzo floors run through the public rooms, polished back rather than replaced. The plaster ceilings are worked into swirls that suggest carbonation. Ceramic tile mosaics survive in their original patterns, and the metalwork was designed to spell out the herbs and spices of the formula that was bottled here, which is the kind of joke a 1931 client could afford to make. The staircase is the set piece, gilded and shaped to recall a soda fountain counter.

Coat Check, The Garage and a Duckpin Alley

The hotel carries two bars of its own, Coat Check Bar and Bottled Blonde, and the district around it supplies the rest. The Garage is the food hall, useful when a group cannot agree. Living Room Theaters puts a cinema in the same complex, and Pins Mechanical brings duckpin bowling, which is a regional variant worth trying once. The effect is that the hotel is a destination in itself on a wet Tuesday, which is not something most city hotels of this size can claim.

Before You Book

Animals are accepted. Check in is from three in the afternoon and check out at eleven. Rooms differ because the plan follows the old building, so it is worth asking what a given room looks onto and how high the ceiling runs. The district downstairs is busy in the evenings, which is the point for most guests; anyone who wants silence should say so when booking and ask for a room away from the venues.