A ten-storey hotel built in 1913 in Savannah, Georgia spent forty years as an office building, and this month it opens as a hotel again. There are 221 rooms. Sixty-two of them hold two or four full beds apiece, and the property has been listed with The Leading Hotels of the World.
1.The address is 7 East Congress Street, facing Johnson Square. It is called Recess Hotel & Club, and the company that developed it also runs it. Of the 221 rooms, 62 are bunk rooms, and the entire second floor belongs to a members' club.
2.The building first opened as a hotel in 1913. William Lee Stoddart designed it in the Beaux-Arts style with 200 rooms, and 100 more were added in 1921. The sign changed to Manger Hotel in 1954, and a bar called the Purple Tree Lounge sat on the roof. Hotel operations ended in 1977. It was converted to offices in 1985 and stayed that way for forty years. The New York firm LEFT LANE bought it for 18 million dollars and is turning it back.
3.Break the 221 down and you get 136 standard rooms, 23 suites and 62 bunk rooms. The bunk rooms are not dormitories. Beds are not sold one berth at a time; the whole room goes to one party, in a Duo with two full beds or a Quad with four. Twenty of the 62 have no television at all.
4.Rooms grow as you climb. The tenth-floor suites keep 5.2-metre ceilings and their original arched windows, and the largest run to 76 square metres. The 1913 mosaic tile has been kept in the corridors, and the light switches are said to be the old push-button kind that click when pressed. The spa goes into the space the old Savannah Health Club used.
5.Every guest floor has a shared lounge called a Rumpus Room. Sofas, televisions, vending machines, board games. The second floor belongs entirely to Club Recess, whose 511 square metres hold libraries, studios and meeting rooms. On the roof sit the Kilter bar and what is billed as the highest pool in Savannah, with a new two-storey, 604-square-metre event hall built alongside.
6.How many people sleep in one room changes the arithmetic here. A Quad with four full beds takes eight; a Duo takes four. The split between the two types has not been disclosed, but assume half and half and the 62 bunk rooms hold roughly 370 people, which matches or beats what the other 159 rooms can take.
7.Savannah's market ADR ran about 152 dollars in 2024, with occupancy near 73 percent. This hotel is listed with The Leading Hotels of the World, so it sits where it can ask double that. Put a king room at 300 dollars and a Quad at 450, and the room rate is 1.5 times higher while the cost per person drops to 56 dollars. These are not published rates but figures worked back from market data.
8.Run 221 rooms for a year. At 70 percent occupancy, RevPAR comes to 210 dollars and room revenue to about 16.9 million dollars. That is rooms alone, and this building has been designed to make more of its money outside them.
9.There are four food and beverage outlets: the French brasserie Le Flâneur, a lobby bar, a takeout window called The Servery modelled on Japanese automats, and Kilter on the roof. Add the spa, the 604-square-metre event hall, and a club that charges dues. In a full-service star hotel this money comes from the ballroom and from weddings. What fills that slot if you never build a ballroom? Those guests come a few times a year and book months out, while club dues and spa memberships arrive on the same day every month.
10.Bunk rooms are expensive to clean. Four beds mean four sets of linen and eight towels, and the revenue is still one room rate, so each dollar of revenue carries more labour than a standard room. That does not make a bunk room cheap, either. What takes the edge off is the lounge on every floor. Guests who come out of their rooms to play leave less mess behind and spend more in the club and on the roof.
11.Count the money going in. Divide the 18 million dollar purchase price by 221 and each room cost about 81,000 dollars. Converting a historic building into a hotel in the United States is generally quoted at 200,000 to 300,000 dollars a key, so at the midpoint total project cost lands near 73 million dollars, or roughly 331,000 dollars a room. Construction costs have not been disclosed, so this part applies industry ranges.
12.Savannah drew 12.9 million visitors last year and they spent 4.1 billion dollars. Close to half came for the day, and those who stayed the night tended to be families or groups. This is a city you cross on foot through 22 squares, so people park and stay several days, and for a guest like that a room that sleeps four is not a discount. It keeps the party together.
13.Operations are not handed off. Jon Kully of LEFT LANE says a management agreement amounts to giving control to an operator who does not share the risk. So the firm built two brands of its own: Bardo on the luxury side, Recess on the lifestyle side. Which buildings make the cut, then? By the company's own account, 98 out of every 100 office buildings will not pencil as hotel conversions.
14.The firm already has one hotel in this city. Hotel Bardo Savannah opened in February 2024 with 149 rooms on two acres beside Forsyth Park, and the company says it leads the market on RevPAR. This is one city split between a luxury brand and a lifestyle brand, and next up is a 40-storey art deco office tower in Pittsburgh.
15.One thing cuts the other way. Business in this city is sliding. Savannah posted a 2 percent RevPAR decline in the second quarter of 2026, one of the few U.S. markets to fall. Supply stands at 18,777 rooms against demand up just 1.1 percent, and 221 more are about to land on top. In 2028 another hotel with 444 rooms opens beside the convention centre.
A hotel that opened in 1913 spent forty years as offices and comes back with 221 rooms. Sixty-two of them take two or four full beds each, selling a room that sleeps up to eight from inside a luxury hotel collection. The purchase alone was 18 million dollars and an estimated 331,000 dollars a key went in, which room rates alone will not repay, hence four F&B outlets, a spa, an event hall and a club charging dues. In Korea a product like this starts with redrawing the fire plans. Korean fire safety law counts occupant load in lodging with beds as staff plus the number of beds, with a double bed counted as two people, so a room with four full beds registers as eight and comes in at four times a standard room. A higher occupant load pulls up the requirements for escape equipment, exit signs and sprinklers. Converting offices into lodging is itself a move up the building code's facility groups, which means a permit rather than a notification.