Ace Hotel is a chain of hotels headquartered in Los Angeles and New York City. Founded in 1999 in Seattle, it operates hotels Internationally in 4 continents, with locations in; Brooklyn, New York City; Palm Springs, California; Seattle, Washington; Kyoto, Japan; Toronto, Canada; and Sydney, Australia with hotels soon to open in Athens, Greece and Fukuoka, Japan.

History

In 1999, the first Ace Hotel was opened. Friends Alex Calderwood, Wade Weigel, and Doug Herrick purchased and transformed a Seattle halfway house into an affordable hotel that would appeal to the creative class. Calderwood and Weigel had previously founded Rudy's, a reinvigorated traditional barbershop concept they started in Seattle, which eventually expanded to more than a dozen locations, along with an experiential marketing company known as Neverstop, and an audiovisual arts platform known as ARO.Space with Pearl Jam co-founder Stone Gossard and Kung Faux creator Mic Neumann, who is credited for bringing in such artists as Kaws and Shepard Fairey to decorate the walls of various Rudy's and Ace Hotel locations. In 2006, the group opened a second hotel in Portland, Oregon followed by properties in Palm Springs, California and New York City in 2009. In 2013, an Ace Hotel opened in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London, where Calderwood had defined a goal of opening a new Ace Hotel every "one to two years", before his untimely death at age 47 on November 16, 2013. In 2014, a downtown Los Angeles location of the Ace Hotel opened in a former theatre, followed by Ace Hotel locations in Pittsburgh in 2015, New Orleans in 2016, and Chicago in 2017. In 2020, an Ace Hotel location opened in Kyoto, Japan that was designed by Kengo Kuma. In September 2020, it was announced that Ace Hotel London Shoreditch would not reopen after being closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Ace Hotel opened locations in Brooklyn, New York; Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia. In 2024 Ace is poised to open a hotel on the Athens Riviera in Greece.

Locations

According to Calderwood, the style and furnishing of each Ace property is designed to reflect its location, with an eye towards re-imagining properties that are "challenged." Former locations:

In popular culture

The 2011 episode "Blunderbuss" of the sketch comedy series Portlandia had a sketch set at the "Deuce Hotel", where the obnoxiously hip staff hand out complimentary turntables and typewriters to all guests; it was a parody specifically of Ace Hotel Portland. On her song Ace, rapper Noname talks about being at Ace Hotel in London. Bon Iver makes a reference to the Ace Hotel Los Angeles in the song "33 "GOD"" on the album 22, A Million.