Detroit's new hotels, from Book Tower to Michigan Central

Detroit opened four new hotels between June 2023 and January 2025. Three luxury hotels are due in 2027, two of them inside buildings that once defined the city: the site of the Hudson's department store and Michigan Central Station. Behind them, a second 600-room convention tower and a 1922 terra-cotta office building are working their way through financing and permits.

The pattern is specific to Detroit. Most of the new rooms are going into buildings that stood empty for years, or onto sites cleared after a landmark was demolished, and most of them are tied to a large developer with a stake in the surrounding blocks: Bedrock downtown, Ford in Corktown.

2023 to 2025: the conversions came first

ROOST Detroit opened on 1 June 2023 as the first hotel ever to operate inside Book Tower, the downtown office skyscraper on Washington Boulevard that Bedrock spent seven years and nearly $400 million restoring. Method Co. runs it as an apartment hotel: 117 studios and one- and two-bedroom units with full kitchens, furniture from Menu, GUBI, Carl Hansen and &Tradition, and stays offered from one night to several months. The tower also holds 229 apartments and a set of restaurants and bars, including Le Supreme and the Japanese Hiroki-san, so guests rarely need to leave the building for dinner. Rooms start at around $200.

Two months later, in August 2023, The Godfrey Detroit opened at 1401 Michigan Avenue in Corktown. It is the exception in this list, a new seven-storey building designed as a hotel from the start, with 227 rooms, a 5,100-square-foot ballroom and a rooftop lounge, I|O, under a retractable glass ceiling that lets it stay open through the Michigan winter. Hamilton's, the ground-floor restaurant, is run with Chickpea Hospitality, the group of Detroit restaurateur Samy Eid. It is the first Curio Collection by Hilton hotel in the city, and at around $110 a night one of the least expensive new hotels in Detroit.

Cambria Hotel Detroit Downtown celebrated its grand opening in October 2023 after a soft launch in May. The building, at 600 West Lafayette Boulevard, is the 1936 Walker-Roehrig Building by Albert Kahn, original home of WWJ, the world's first commercial radio station. The restoration took four years and about $70 million. Inside, the 154 rooms come with Art Deco patterns, peacock motifs in the lobby bar, golf simulators and duckpin bowling on the lobby level. Rates start at about $140.

The most recent opening grafts a new tower onto a theatre. AC Hotel Detroit at the Bonstelle, which opened in January 2025 on Woodward Avenue in Brush Park, is a ten-storey, 154-room building linked by a glass conservatory to the Bonstelle Theatre, designed by Albert Kahn in 1903 as a synagogue and later remodelled as a playhouse by C. Howard Crane. The hotel cost $49 million; the theatre's restoration, a related but separate project, between $7 million and $10 million. The conservatory serves as lobby bar and restaurant, with gin cocktails and Spanish small plates. Rooms start at about $190, and the theatre-facing ones are the reason to choose this hotel over any other AC.

2027: three luxury hotels in one year

The Detroit EDITION is billed as downtown Detroit's first five-star hotel. It will occupy the lower floors of the new 45-storey, 681-foot Hudson's Detroit tower, built by Bedrock on the site of the J.L. Hudson's department store, which anchored downtown for most of the 20th century before its demolition. The hotel, designed by SHoP Architects with Hamilton Anderson Associates, will have 227 rooms, four restaurants and bars, a pool, a terrace and a spa, with 97 residences above. It is the EDITION brand's first hotel in the Midwest.

In Corktown, NoMad Detroit will take floors 14 to 18 of Michigan Central Station, floors that were never used in the building's history. The 1913 depot sat abandoned for three decades before Ford restored it as the centre of its 30-acre Michigan Central campus. Hilton's NoMad brand, which has never opened in the United States under Hilton, was chosen from 16 competing proposals. About 180 rooms, including 30 suites, are planned, along with restaurants in the station's former restaurant and carriage house, and interiors developed with Detroit artists and makers.

The third hotel is built for volume. JW Marriott Detroit Water Square, a 25-storey tower with 601 rooms, is rising on the riverfront site of Joe Louis Arena, demolished in 2021, and will connect to the Huntington Place convention centre by a skybridge. Every room has floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Detroit River and the Ambassador and Gordie Howe bridges. The schedule is set by an event: completion is planned for early 2027, before Detroit hosts the men's NCAA Final Four. The hotel will have more than 53,000 square feet of meeting space, a spa and a 50-foot indoor lap pool.

Three luxury openings in a single year would be a lot for any mid-sized American city. In Detroit's case they also split neatly by purpose: EDITION for the downtown address and its residences, NoMad for the symbolism of the station and the Corktown restaurants, JW Marriott for conventions and sport.

A second convention hotel, still on paper

The JW Marriott will not be enough for the largest events at Huntington Place, according to the convention authority. In April 2026 the Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority and Congress & Associates, an affiliate of the local Sterling Group, presented plans for the Second Huntington Place Convention Center Hotel: roughly 600 rooms in a 25-storey tower costing about $450 million, on the block just north of the convention centre. The plan requires demolishing Fort Washington Plaza, a 16-storey office building from 1969, and the Downtown Garage. Ownership would be split 51 percent for the developer and its future hotel brand, 49 percent for the authority.

Nothing about it is settled beyond the site, the budget and the room count. No brand has been chosen, no architect named, and construction is not expected to start before early 2027.

The one without a brand

The Merchants Building, an eight-storey tower faced in white terra cotta at Broadway and East Grand River Avenue, was built in 1922 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. It sat largely empty for decades. Method Development bought it in May 2022 for $5.9 million and plans a $44 million conversion into the Merchants Building Hotel, with roughly 135 rooms, event space and a rooftop restaurant, designed by Kraemer Design Group. The historic commission approved it in May 2023 and the city issued a permit in January 2024. Three years on, no brand or operator has been named and no opening date set; even the room count varies by source, with one tracker citing 121.

Where the new hotels are

Downtown holds most of them: ROOST and Cambria are already open there, EDITION will follow at the Hudson's site, and the Merchants Building sits on its eastern edge in the theatre district, near Comerica Park and the Fox Theatre. The riverfront gets the JW Marriott and, if it is built, the second convention hotel.

Corktown, west of downtown, is the other centre of gravity. The Godfrey has been on Michigan Avenue since 2023; NoMad will open a few minutes away inside the station that Ford turned into a campus. Brush Park, north of downtown, has the AC Hotel at the Bonstelle.

What it adds up to

Four hotels opened, three luxury hotels due in 2027, two more projects in the queue: roughly 2,400 rooms between what has opened since 2023 and what is announced. The prices so far sit between $110 and $200 a night, and the arrivals of 2027 will add a top tier the city has never had.

What remains to be seen is whether leisure demand follows the conventions and the sports calendar. The JW Marriott and the second convention tower are bets on group business; EDITION and NoMad are bets that travellers will come to Detroit for Detroit. All the hotels in this guide, and the city's other openings, are on our Detroit page.