Riggs Washington DC

Penn Quarter's Adaptive Reuse Moment

Riggs Washington DC is a 5-star hotel in Washington, D.C., in Penn Quarter. Washington D.C. has spent the better part of two decades shedding its reputation as a city of interchangeable government-adjacent hotels. The shift hasn't come from the established luxury names but from a wave of adaptive reuse projects that trade on the capital's own architectural history rather than generic five-star formulas. Riggs Washington DC, which occupies a 19th-century Romanesque Revival bank building at 900 F St NW in Penn Quarter, sits near the leading edge of that shift. Its Michelin Key is the kind of credential that confirms a hotel has cleared the peer-set bar rather than merely claimed to.

Penn Quarter is the right neighbourhood for this kind of project. Positioned between the Mall and the city's main commercial corridors, it draws a crowd that is neither purely tourist nor purely business traveller, and the density of cultural institutions nearby means that guests who care about where they sleep tend to care about more than thread counts. Riggs reads this audience correctly: the building's bones are preserved and celebrated, but the interior treatment is not the respectful, slightly stiff restoration that historic conversions often produce. Compare it with the stately formality you'd find at The Hay-Adams Hotel or the classical grandeur of The Jefferson, and Riggs occupies a notably different register, more colour, more personality, less deference to convention.

What the Awards Signal About Positioning

A Michelin Key, introduced in 2024, evaluates hotels on a different axis than the star system applied to restaurants: architecture, service culture, and the coherence of the overall experience all factor in. Riggs receiving that recognition in the award's inaugural year places it in a select tier of D.C. properties, one that includes only a handful of addresses in the city. La Liste's 93-point score operates on a similar logic, aggregating critical assessments across multiple published sources to produce a composite standing. Together, these two signals position Riggs not as a boutique outlier but as a legitimate contender in the upper bracket of D.C. luxury hotels, alongside properties like Rosewood Washington, D.C. and Salamander Washington DC.

The rate starts at $413 per night. Luxury adaptive-reuse hotels in major American cities, consider Raffles Boston or The Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, both of which occupy historic structures with comparable conversion ambitions, tend to price at a premium relative to new-build properties because the structural and conservation costs are higher and the inventory is fixed. At 181 rooms, Riggs is large enough to maintain consistent staffing and programming, but not so large that it loses the sense of place that defines the better adaptive-reuse hotels.

The Architecture as Experience

The core appeal of any bank-to-hotel conversion is the drama of the original public spaces, and Riggs doesn't underplay this. The banking hall's scale, with its towering columns, now serves as the home of Café Riggs, overseen by Patrick Curran, a Momofuku alumnus. That culinary lineage matters for context: Momofuku's alumni network has a documented track record of producing technically accomplished, creatively confident restaurants rather than hotel dining rooms that coast on a captive audience. Café Riggs therefore functions as a genuine destination within the building rather than an amenity that guests reluctantly use when they don't want to go out.

Below ground, Silver Lyan operates as a subterranean bar and represents the first American outpost of the London-based cocktail programme developed by Ryan Chetiyawardana. Chetiyawardana's bars in London have accumulated sustained critical attention for technical precision and a format that treats the cocktail list as a considered document rather than a catalogue. Transplanting that sensibility to a vaulted, below-grade space in a former bank vault positions Silver Lyan as one of the more intellectually coherent bar programmes in the city. For guests tracking where serious cocktail culture has moved since the speakeasy era wound down, and the parallel conversation is worth having for anyone who has visited Eaton D.C. or The Dupont Circle Hotel, this is the more technically demanding programme of the set.

The Rooftop at Riggs adds a third distinct venue, with panoramic views across Penn Quarter. Rooftop spaces at urban hotels often overpromise on views and underdeliver on programming; in this case, the Penn Quarter sightlines are substantive enough to stand independently of whatever the menu does.

Rooms: Colour as a Design Commitment

Washington D.C. luxury hotels have historically defaulted to a palette drawn from federal architecture: cream, grey, dark wood. Riggs takes the opposite position. The 181 rooms deploy jewel tones, oak flooring, and marble bathrooms in a combination that has been described as carrying a Parisian influence, a reasonable shorthand for the European domestic scale that the rooms achieve, distinct from the more monumental approach that governs much of the city's hotel stock. This puts Riggs in dialogue with the aesthetic choices being made at design-led properties elsewhere in the country, from Troutbeck in Amenia to SingleThread Farm Inn in Healdsburg, where colour and material specificity are used to signal editorial intent.

The signature suites carry the design logic furthest. Each is named for a First Lady, an explicit acknowledgment of the building's Washington identity, and furnished with antique-style pieces that add a layer of narrative to the room rather than simply increasing the square footage. One suite includes a piano, a gesture that tips into something closer to a residential sensibility than a hotel room. For context on what that tier of suite programming looks like at comparable historic-conversion properties nationally, the First Lady suites at Riggs occupy a similar conceptual space to the named suites at Aman New York or the storied accommodations at Badrutt's Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, where room identity is part of the product rather than a secondary consideration.

Planning Your Stay

Riggs sits at 900 F St NW, within walking distance of the National Mall, the National Portrait Gallery, and the city's main Metro interchange at Gallery Place-Chinatown. Rates begin at $365 per night. The hotel's three distinct food and drink venues, Café Riggs, Silver Lyan, and the rooftop, mean there is limited reason to leave the building on arrival evenings, though Penn Quarter's restaurant density makes the surrounding blocks worth exploring for longer stays.

Travellers weighing Riggs against other D.C. options should note where it sits in the market. Mayflower Inn and Pendry Washington DC at The Wharf offer alternative character propositions at different price points and neighbourhoods. Those who prioritise bar programming above everything else will find Silver Lyan's credentials harder to match elsewhere in the city. Those primarily focused on views and location may want to compare rooftop offerings across the Penn Quarter and Georgetown sets before committing.