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Set to open on June 28, The Last Hotel (1501 Washington) is one of the most eagerly anticipated new hotels to open in St. Louis in recent years. Recently, SLM had the chance to preview the space and its dining and drinking options.

The Last Hotel is the latest project from Tim Dixon’s Fe Equus, whose Milwaukee hotel The Iron Horse helped transform that city’s tannery district. “I go into old neighborhoods,” Dixon says. “With The Iron Horse, we spent $30 million in an area that was nothing but cold storage and old, decrepit buildings. It’s now one of the hottest neighborhoods because we committed to it.”

Photography by Matt Haas Photography

Dixon believes The Last Hotel will have a similarly positive effect on downtown St. Louis. “Washington was a vibrant community at one time, and I think it’s back on the upswing,” Dixon says. “My partners and I have got a $60 million investment here. That’s the start, but what brought me here is the community and the building. The culture is rich, and the local culture will appreciate what we’ve done here and it will become their St. Louis hotel. This will be a true, genuine St. Louis experience.”

The hotel is located in the long-disused International Shoe Company building (the “last” refers to a tool used to give shape to shoes). It’s adjacent to the City Museum, and a corridor links the two buildings. Though the corridor won’t provide through access for guests, The Last Hotel hopes to create an urban garden in the currently disused space.

The hotel’s interior combines elegant furniture and fittings with a stripped-down aesthetic that leaves the building’s original brickwork and piping exposed. That aesthetic carries over to the property’s 142 rooms, including one second-floor suite that opens out onto a slender balcony overlooking Washington Avenue.

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Dixon says the first floor is designed to evoke the kind of lively street life you might find in the alleyways of a European city. In the corridor past the check-in desk, a shoeshiner will polish up guests’ shoes – a nod to the building’s history. The hotel will even produce and sell its own shoelaces, which staff will also wear. “This was the largest shoe conglomerate in the early 1900s, and we were also the shoelace capital of the world.”

Next to the shoeshine stand, The Pantry will stock a variety of products made both in-house – “anything we make that we can sell,” says Dixon – and by other St. Louis businesses. Dixon says we can expect jarred pickles and hot sauce from the hotel’s kitchen, six-packs from top local breweries, and a rye created exclusively for The Last Hotel by David Weglarz at StilL 630.

A lobby bar and the hotel’s restaurant, The Last Kitchen, take up the remainder of the first floor. The restaurant will seat around 60 diners, giving way seamlessly to the bar area. The large windows on the eastern and southern walls will help the restaurant and bar fit in with the area surrounding the hotel, as well as inviting attention from passers-by and welcoming natural light. Local furniture crafter David Stine is creating “a chef’s table, for bartenders” (according to Dixon) for the lobby bar, with a spectacular walnut tree root forming the base of the table.

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Executive chef Evy Swoboda will preside over a large kitchen downstairs in the hotel’s basement. Dixon says he believes they’ve built the best kitchen facility in the city, complete with smokers, roasters, fryers and a dedicated butcher room. “We’re bringing whole animals into the butcher room, we’re making our own sausages, our own cuts. We use everything, even the skin on the chicken,” Dixon says.

Up on the 11th floor, The Last Rooftop is expected to open soon after the rest of the hotel and will offer guests cocktails, wine and beer in addition to food prepared by the 10th-floor kitchen. Although the downtown skyline obscures the Arch, The Last Rooftop still allows a stunning view of the city. A long, narrow pool is the rooftop’s centerpiece. Dixon explained that the pool is designed for socializing more than swimming. “It has to be 42 inches deep,” Dixon says, and he’s not joking about the precision involved. At that depth, Dixon says, your lower body can be comfortably submerged while you’re still able to hold and sip on a drink comfortably.

The roof also functions as a retention pond, collecting and holding rainwater during storms. The water can be drained later, helping the city to regulate stormwater management.

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One of the rooftop’s other standout features will be a hippo sculpture created by Bob Cassilly, the late founder of City Museum. The hippo once graced the corner of the building’s rooftop, but can’t be restored to its original location because of city regulations. The hippo and a manatee sculpture that once sat in the building’s lobby will take up residence on the rooftop, Dixon says.