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The Best Hotels In Washington, D.C.

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It's the seat of the federal government—but as a city, Washington has never really known what it was supposed to be. In their own hostile disagreement at the founding hour, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson put it all in motion, and the argument never really stopped—Maryland and Virginia ceded the land, then-President Washington engaged French/American planner Pierre L’Enfant to work up a layout. And 22 years later the British burned to the ground what little of it that had been built.

Some 200 years on, Washingtonians still have no voice in Congress. These contentious foundations are why Washington's neighborhoods often seem to be city-states—Kalorama is not Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle is not Georgetown, and none of that is Alexandria, which took great care to secede from the capital back to Virginia in 1846. But what the city does well is to act as a gracious host to an ever-rotating cast of important—and self-important—characters.

The hotels in Washington—and not just the Watergate—have seen it all.

The Hay-Adams

There is only one Hay-Adams. In more than 90 years, it has never succumbed to a chain. Built on the site where 19th-century John Hay and Henry Adams houses were razed by the hotel’s developer in 1927, the Hay-Adams has been through eight owners but, thankfully, it hasn’t changed much. Its Restaurant Lafayette still overlooks the White House, its 145 rooms and suites are still capacious and done in old-school luxe. There is a new, and spectacular, top-floor meeting and dining space that can accommodate some 340 people. But aside from that, the Hay-Adams remains what it always was, a bedrock of Washington’s social and political life. That the bar’s name is Off The Record should tell us a bit about the hotel’s drawing power for the local elite. An early breakfast in the Lafayette will give you a glimpse of the heaviest brokers in Washington’s corridors of power as they take their first meetings of the day.

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The Jefferson

The unstated but direct five-star rival to the Hay-Adams, a bit further north on 16th Street, is the Jefferson, with 99 rooms, 20 suites and Michelin-starred chef in Ralf Schlegel, who mans the stove at the hotel’s go-to restaurant Plume. There Jeffersoniana adorns the walls, much of it original. There’s a spa, and the plush bar is called Quill, referencing the fourth president’s voluminous writings and his literary talents. The Jefferson is not where you book when you can’t get a room at the Hay-Adams—it’s where you book as the antithesis to the Hay-Adams.

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The Line

Once-staid Washington has caught a whiff of the lodging trends in repurposed buildings, and none more entertainingly so than in The Line, a boutique franchise operation from New York’s Sydell Group in a deconsecrated former Church of Christ church in Adams Morgan in northwest Washington. The Sydell Group has an iconoclastic portfolio in Los Angeles and Austin, and with its stone portico and columns in leafy northwest Adams-Morgan, the Line doesn’t have to try hard to be hip, it just is hip. Adams Morgan is chock-a-block with music bars and performance venues, so if you’re in town to chill rather than to lobby Congress, the Line is your spot.

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The Watergate Hotel

Staying at the Watergate—quite a bold, modern-luxury hotel, by the way, renovated and reopened in 2016—will also bring you to a realization about the corridors of power in this town: The ad-hoc gang of third-rate burglars who botched the Republican break-in of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel’s neighboring office building in 1972 actually thought that they would get away with it. The authors of the caper, President Richard Nixon’s closest White House advisors, thought the same. The Watergate Hotel remains a noble freighter on the Potomac, offers a breathtaking view down the Potomac from its rooftop bistro and has wittily rounded the corner on its political legacy in constructing the “Scandal Suite”—formerly Room 214, the room used by the Plumbers as their forward base in the hotel for the break-in next door. Book the Scandal Suite. It provides a splendid walk back through the Seventies, and even has its own set of binoculars and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, just in case you might want to tape some of your conversations, as President Nixon often did. And if you like your scandals to be bipartisan, Monica Lewinsky lived at the Watergate complex back in the 1990s.

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The Willard InterContinental

The Willard, the Beaux-Arts ship of state on Pennsylvania Avenue, has hosted ten presidents, including Lincoln, Grant and Woodrow Wilson. Samuel Clemens wrote two books here. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that it was the corridor of power, far more so than the actual buildings of the government. U.S. Grant, as president, used to take whiskey and a cigar in the lobby. And Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his “I Have A Dream” speech in the Willard before delivering it so mightily to the great march’s people at the Lincoln Memorial. Belonging now to the InterContinental chain and brought to a high sheen, the venerable old five-star is luxe of the old school, with a Peacock Alley of shops, and a splendid view of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building from its Cafe du Parc.

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The Ritz-Carlton Georgetown

Of Washington’s luxury hotels crafted from repurposed buildings, the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown stands out in that it was built around Georgetown’s old refuse incinerator, dating from 1932. But the Ritz-Carlton’s location just blocks from Georgetown’s toniest mansions and row houses has long since proven that the investment in the welcoming 86-room hotel in the early Aughts was a sound one. Fitting in a gym and full-service spa was a no-brainer, and the use of the generous public spaces of the old industrial complex is ingeniously grand. Add to the elbow room that you’re within a very, very pleasant walk to Georgetown’s plethora of upscale bars and restaurants, and the Ritz-Carlton starts to make a lot of sense.

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The Mansion on O Street

The more than 100 rooms at Mansion on O Street bring the funk and flash to Dupont Circle, which is two blocks away, but simply to say that the Mansion is eclectic is an understatement. Its decor takes a page from the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet era, combined with an insouciant jumble of art and antiques that could just be your Aunt Catherine’s—or your Aunt Mary’s, depending. With a boasted “seven secret entrances” in the conjoined three Belle Epoque houses to insure your privacy, the Mansion has hosted quite a few VIPs who prefer the kaleidoscopic version of cool to the minimalism of “cool” elsewhere. That’s not to say that the man with the turned-up trench-coat collar and shades on the sofa across the room will be one of those elites or a bodyguard to them, but at the Mansion, I wouldn’t put it past him.

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