21c Museum Hotel St. Louis

21c Museum Hotels turned downtown St. Louis's derelict Renaissance Revival YMCA into a 173-room boutique hotel wrapped around a genuinely free, round-the-clock contemporary art museum. It opened in August 2023, pairing Idol Wolf's Iberian-leaning tapas with more than 14,000 square feet of rotating exhibitions.

The place

The hotel occupies the former YMCA at 1528 Locust Street in downtown St. Louis, a ten-story Renaissance Revival building that had sat institutional and closed to casual visitors for years before its conversion.

The concept

21c's formula — a serious, curator-led contemporary art museum bolted onto a boutique hotel, open free to the public 24/7 — lands in St. Louis inside a building that spent decades as a YMCA, its original swim and athletic facilities now repurposed as the Locust Street Athletic and Swim Club spa. Architects Perfido Weiskopf Wagstaf + Goettel handled the historic shell while Hufft Projects and Bill Rooney Studio designed the interiors, and the inaugural show, ‘Revival: Digging Into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow,’ filled more than 14,000 square feet with work from 47 international artists. The brand's signature move — a site-specific animal sculpture standing in for the museum's unofficial mascot at each property — and large-scale commissions like Nick Cave and Bob Faust's ceiling piece ‘Until We Meet Again’ give the public spaces a genuine gallery feel rather than hotel-lobby art. It is one of the more ambitious adaptive-reuse projects downtown St. Louis has seen this decade.

Dining & wellness

Idol Wolf serves Spanish-inflected, tapas-style dining built around local and seasonal ingredients; Good Press handles coffee and pastries; the Locust Street Athletic and Swim Club — housed in the building's original YMCA pool and gym spaces — covers fitness, massage and swim.