Kinn Guesthouse Downtown converted a 170-year-old Broadway loft building into a 31-room hotel in March 2022, bringing the Bay View guesthouse brand's shared-kitchen, residential concept into the heart of downtown Milwaukee. It's a boutique counterpoint to the city's convention hotels, built around communal floor kitchens and a ground-floor restaurant from the Uncle Wolfie's team.
Kinn Guesthouse Downtown occupies a mansard-roofed, four-story building from the 1850s at 600–606 N. Broadway, on the edge of the Historic Third Ward and a short walk from the Riverwalk. The structure spent decades as retail and manufacturing space and later as law-firm offices before Vetter Architects and Pepper Construction converted it into a hotel for the first time, opening in March 2022: a second, downtown location for the small Milwaukee guesthouse brand founded in Bay View in 2017.
The concept
Kinn trades the usual hotel formula for something closer to a serviced residence: 31 rooms spread across floors that each share a fully furnished communal kitchen stocked with Wolf appliances and complimentary wine and pastries, encouraging guests to mingle rather than retreat straight to their rooms. A rooftop event space and a lower-level speakeasy-style lounge round out the shared areas.
The brand's pitch is intimacy over amenities checklists: no towering lobby, no chain branding, just a restored 19th-century building run with a residential, host-driven feel. It has drawn attention as one of only a handful of Milwaukee properties recognized by the Michelin Guide's hotel selection, an unusual nod for a 31-room independent.
Dining & wellness
The ground floor houses The Wolf on Broadway, a full-service restaurant from the owners of Uncle Wolfie's Breakfast Tavern with a menu developed by chef Kristen Schwab, formerly of DanDan; it opened later than the hotel itself, with its official debut in November 2023. Each guest floor also has its own communal chef's kitchen for self-catering, on top of the standalone restaurant.
