Fairmont Olympic Hotel Seattle
— — the lobby that has held a hundred years of weather.
Not only on a wall.
“An Italian Renaissance facade on University Street, with a quiet, double-height lobby of oak panelling, chandeliers, and a marble floor that holds the sound of a city in from the rain. The hotel opened in 1924 as the Olympic, on the site of the original University of Washington campus. The Georgian Room, the Terrace, the wide spread of the Spanish Ballroom — these rooms have hosted Seattle's century. Outside, the city changes shape every decade; inside, the brass and the millwork hold. The Christmas tree in the lobby goes up the day after Thanksgiving and runs three storeys. The afternoon tea has carried through wars, recessions, and a complete rebuild of the city around it. — from the studio
Fairmont Olympic Hotel Seattle, 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 Fairmont Olympic Hotel sits at 411 University Street in downtown Seattle, four blocks east of Pike Place Market and one block north of the Seattle Art Museum. It was designed by George B. Post & Sons in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and opened on December 6, 1924, as the Olympic Hotel. The site is the original 10-acre campus of the University of Washington, which moved north in 1895; the land is still held in trust for the university. The hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and renovated under Four Seasons management before passing to Fairmont in 2003. It has 450 guest rooms across 12 floors.
The exterior is brick and terra-cotta in the Italian Renaissance Revival manner, with a rusticated stone base and an arcaded ground floor. The lobby is the room the hotel is remembered for — a double-height space with carved oak panelling, a coffered plaster ceiling, and Tennessee marble underfoot. The Spanish Ballroom and the Georgian Room carry the same period detailing, with full-height columns, gilt millwork, and the heavy bronze hardware of an early-twentieth-century city hotel. The building was the most ambitious civic project Seattle had undertaken when it opened, costing roughly $4 million in 1924 dollars and built with stock subscribed by Seattle residents themselves.
The hotel has marked Seattle's calendar for a century. The lobby Christmas tree, three storeys tall, is lit the day after Thanksgiving and stays up through New Year's Day; the lighting ceremony is one of the city's longest-running public holiday events. Afternoon tea runs year-round in the Georgian Room, with two seatings on weekends. The hotel's centennial was celebrated in December 2024 with a year-long program of period menus, archival displays, and a curated set of public events. It sits one block from the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall and two blocks from the 5th Avenue Theatre, which feeds steady opening-night traffic through the lobby.