citizenM San Francisco Union Square

citizenM opened its first Bay Area hotel in November 2021, a ground-up 12-story tower on Ellis Street a block from Union Square. The 195-room property follows the brand's compact-room, communal-lobby formula, with a third-floor check-in area, a 24/7 canteenM bar-restaurant, and a publicly accessible rooftop on the 13th floor.

The place

The hotel sits at 72 Ellis Street, a block off Union Square in downtown San Francisco, in the middle of the city's shopping and theater district. It's the kind of dense, walkable location citizenM has built its US strategy around: guests arrive with no car and rely entirely on foot access to the neighborhood's stores, restaurants and transit.

The concept

This is a ground-up 12-story tower, not a conversion: 130 feet of new construction that broke ground in 2019 and opened in November 2021, in the middle of the pandemic downturn that shelved plenty of other hotel projects. It was citizenM's first hotel in the Bay Area and its second California opening that year, following Los Angeles Downtown a few months earlier. The layout follows the brand's now-familiar formula: check-in happens one floor up, on the third level, in a space designed to read more like a shared living room than a hotel lobby, with double-height ceilings and bookshelves rather than a reception desk. citizenM's design language for this property draws on San Francisco's own neighborhoods (the Castro, the Mission) rather than the city's tech-industry identity.

Dining & wellness

canteenM, the brand's 24/7 bar-restaurant, occupies the ground floor with hot food at lunch and dinner and coffee, snacks and drinks available around the clock. A fourth-floor gym is equipped with Peloton bikes, and the building tops out with a 13th-floor rooftop mezzanine fitted with picnic tables: a public space rather than a guests-only amenity.