AKA: Hotel Theodore, Downtown, Seattle, WA

Structure Type: built works - dwellings -public accommodations - hotels

Designers: Graham, John and Company, Architects and Engineers (firm); Marinello, Susan, Interiors (firm); John Graham Sr. (architect/engineer); Harold Lockland (architectural designer); Susan Marinello (interior designer)

Dates: constructed 1928-1929

20 stories, total floor area: 98,634 sq. ft.

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1531 7th Avenue
Downtown, Seattle , WA 98101-1703

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Building History

Seattle architect John Graham, Sr., (1873-1955) designed the Roosevelt Hotel in the late 1920s.

The Roosevelt Hotel Limited Partnership sold the property to the Patriot American Hospitality Partnership on 03/31/1996 for $15,138,800. About two-and-one-half years later, Patriot sold the Roosevelt to Northcoast Washington LLC for $11,883,267. Northcoast realized a substantial profit when it sold the building on 03/11/2015 to Roosevelt Hotel Owner LLC for $37 million.

In 2014, the Roosevelt Hotel had 20 floors with 151 rooms, of which 13 were suites. The Roosevelt also maintained a small fitness room on its second floor.

Gordon Sondland (born 07/16/1957 on Mercer Island, WA), the Trump Administration's United States Ambassador to the European Union from 2018 to 2020, and his company, Provenance Hotels ,purchased the building in 2015 and undertook a two-year renovation, renaming the property the "Hotel Theodore," which opened in 2017. In 2021, the hotel had 234 rooms.

Building Notes

The stepped-back massing, emphatic vertical lines separating windows and flat top of the Roosevelt Hotel suggested a debt to Eliel Saarinen's 1922 Tribune Tower Competition Entry. Saarinen's composition, although it did not win first prize, exerted significant impact on American skyscraper design of the mid-late 1920s.

A pencil presentation drawing by Harry Lockland (1894-1972) dating from 1930 is preserved in the UW Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Seattle, WA, accessed 09/28/2009.

Tel: 206.621.1200 (2006).

Alteration

The Roosevelt closed during the 1980s, reopening in 1989, renovated. Another renovation occurred in 2005.

New building owners, the Portland, OR-based Provenance Hotels, headed by Sondland, directed a renovation of the proeprty between 2015 and 2017. Its web site for the Hotel Theodore stated in 2021: "In 2015, Provenance Hotels purchased the property, and began floor-by-floor renovations, spearheaded by Seattle-based Susan Marinello Interiors. We added refined, industrial-style furnishings to create an upscale urban boutique hotel that reflects the needs, desires and dreams of today’s modern travelers. Fully refreshed, the hotel reopened in 2017 under the name Hotel Theodore, a nod to its historic namesake." (See Provenance Hotels.com, "Hotel Theodore: History," accessed 03/10/2021.)