One Night in a New Boutique Hotel From Baltimore’s Most Beloved Design Shop

Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

I didn’t know what to expect last summer when I boarded a train from New York to Baltimore. I’d been invited to stay at Guesthouse, a new boutique hotel run by the couple behind Good Neighbor, which Dwell previously profiled as one of the best independent design shops in the United States, so I expected to have a nice place to lay my head, but beyond that, I had no idea. I’d never been to Charm City before, and I associated it with little more than The Wire and John Waters. I didn’t even know if people really call it Charm City. I still don’t.

But when I tell you that I was changed by what I saw there—yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not exaggerating. Baltimore took this jaded New Yorker, worn down by years in the Big Apple’s competitive, fame-fueled design scene, and gave me hope for what a collaborative creative community could achieve. And there was good food. After my two-day visit getting to know local designers and the spaces they’re building together in Baltimore, I was daydreaming about the life I could be living on my train ride home.

Guesthouse sits on top of Good Neighbor, and as its name suggests, the store and cafe’s relaxed hangout vibe makes for an easy welcome into town. Its enormous terraced yard hosts a design festival each summer where local luminaries give talks and lead workshops open to the community. If you don’t have owners Shawn Chopra and Anne Morgan to show you around like I did, the lineups from those events provide a cheat sheet to getting the lay of the land. And, as I learned quickly, there’s a lot in the city to enjoy.

Tuesday

1 p.m.: I get to Guesthouse in the early afternoon after a five-minute cab ride from Baltimore’s Penn Station. The hotel is on a side street in the Hampden neighborhood, where Waters shot many of his movies, but the hotel and its sibling cafe/shop are much more subdued than what you’d see in Hairspray. They’d be easy to miss if it weren’t for the terraced hillside next-door that’s both a space for Good Neighbor’s outdoor cafe seating and a kind of billboard of activity announcing that this is a place for the artfully dressed to congregate.

Walking up the steps to the hotel entry is transportive. First, a porch with big jute rugs and Donald Juddesque furniture, buffered from the street by weathered steel guardrails and loads of plants, provides a hint of what’s to come. Then, the lobby. It smells like a hike in the Sierra Nevadas the day after you got a raise. Visually, it has the same vibe, a kind of groovy wooden dream accented by a steel beam running overhead and a large, moody painting by longtime local and Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald inset into the wall. It’s the sort of fancy space in which the Poughkeepsie kid in me feels instinctively like it doesn’t belong, but Justin Timothy Temple, good neighbor’s director of brand and marketing, is all smiles behind the light-brick front desk and puts me at ease.

While I’m getting set up, Chopra comes in to say hello, and he takes me on a tour of the hotel’s two floors, containing seven rooms in total. The rooms are decorated slightly differently, but they all continue the elevated earthy look and feel, outfitted with reclaimed hardwood floors and Hem furniture, and it continues to smell amazing, courtesy of Le Labo products throughout. Chopra and Morgan designed the spaces with Baltimore interior designer Ariana Grieu, and Good Neighbor’s in-house design team led by Alejandro Villasenor Garcia crafted the built-in furniture. Almost everything is shoppable; products from Good Neighbor populate the spaces, including some rippled glasses from Ferm Living and an Iris Hantverk wooden shoehorn. A couple windows in my room look out over the lawn, and after Chopra and I make plans for dinner and a tour of the city the next day, I head downstairs with my laptop to work for the afternoon.

With a gooey cheese sandwich from the cafe in hand, I find a seat in the shade by a collage mural by local artist SHAN Wallace and start triaging my inbox. It feels more like I’m in a calm public park than a cafe patio, a more pleasant place to work than the cramped Lower Manhattan coffee shops I’m used to.

6 p.m.: At dinner time, my city-envy grows when Chopra and Morgan take me to Clavel, a taqueria and mezcaleria opened by buzzy local restaurateur Lane Harlan and chef Carlos Raba closer to downtown. It has a stripped-back warehouse interior that’s warmer than the typical postindustrial food hall thanks to just the right amount of decorative baskets and textile wall art. Unfortunately, it’s full, but it has a takeout side next door with a small shop selling a selection of earthy ceramics and the like. A few marshmallowesque stools by local woodworker Kenny Johnston catch my eye and summarize the overall casual but considered aesthetic. We grab an assortment of tacos and mezcalitas and some space on the covered patio. It’s the sort of setup that would be twice as expensive and three times as crowded in New York, and I’d probably have to follow some obscure foodie Substack just to know how to get a reservation. But here, I sit back while the sun starts to set, and I feel my blood pressure slowly drop.