Davenport Hotel Spokane
— a lobby that kept its inheritance.
Not only on a wall.
“The hotel that anchored downtown Spokane for a century. Kirtland Cutter designed it for Louis Davenport and it opened in 1914 with a Spanish Renaissance lobby, a fountain, and a coffered ceiling whose pattern has been copied many times since. The hotel closed in 1985 and stood empty for seventeen years before Walt and Karen Worthy reopened it in 2002 after a thirty-eight million dollar restoration. The lobby is the room people still drive across the state to see.
Davenport Hotel Spokane, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Davenport Hotel stands at 10 South Post Street in downtown Spokane, Washington, a block south of the Spokane River and the falls that power the city. It opened in 1914, designed by the architect Kirtland Cutter for the restaurateur Louis Davenport, who had built his name on the Davenport Restaurant on the same block. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Spokane is the largest city in eastern Washington, with a metropolitan population of about six hundred thousand, and is the rail and highway hub of the Inland Northwest.
Cutter worked in a free Spanish Renaissance Revival idiom, layering carved plaster, mahogany, marble, and a coffered ceiling above the central lobby fountain. When the hotel opened in 1914 it was among the first in the country with air-conditioned dining rooms, a central vacuum system, and refrigerated drinking water in every guest room. The Hall of the Doges, modelled on the ducal hall of the Doge's Palace in Venice, hosts weddings and galas. The restoration finished in 2002 reinstalled the original Otis elevator cars and recast the lobby plasterwork from the original Cutter moulds.
The hotel ran continuously from 1914 to 1985, then stood dark for seventeen years. Walt and Karen Worthy bought the empty building in 2000 and spent thirty-eight million dollars on the restoration, which reopened the lobby and the original tower in 2002. Three sister properties followed under the Davenport Hotel Collection: the Davenport Tower, the Historic Davenport Lusso, and the Davenport Grand across Spokane Falls Boulevard. The lobby has been a public room of Spokane since 1914, and a long-running tradition holds that anyone may sit by the fountain and order a cup of tea.