Aloft Philadelphia Downtown

Aloft Philadelphia Downtown opened in August 2017 inside the former Liberty Title & Trust Building, a 1925 bank and office tower on North Broad Street left vacant for two decades before HRI Properties and Realen Properties redeveloped it. The 179-room hotel is Aloft's take on adaptive reuse — loft-style rooms inserted into a building that had never operated as a hotel before.

The place

Attached directly to the Pennsylvania Convention Center and a short walk from City Hall and the Avenue of the Arts, the location favors convention and conference traffic as much as leisure visitors headed to Independence Hall a mile away.

The concept

Stonehill Taylor led the design, preserving the second-floor lobby's original coffered ceiling and oversized windows from the building's 1925 construction while wrapping Aloft's standard loft-style rooms — high ceilings, exposed structure, an unfussy palette — around them. It's a straightforward adaptive-reuse story: an empty bank and office building, vacant for two decades, given a functional second life as a select-service hotel serving the convention trade. HRI Properties developed the project with Realen Properties.

Dining & wellness

W XYZ Bar anchors the lobby with cocktails and a casual bar menu; Re:fuel by Aloft covers grab-and-go food and coffee around the clock, in keeping with the brand's self-service model.