Suite Life

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #49

Mar 16, 2022

Along I-270, in Rockville, Maryland, is this apartment building, called The Flats at Shady Grove. (Rockville is really interesting—I wrote a two-part photo essay about it, part 1, and part 2.)

Here it is in Google’s 3D View (a neat composite of satellite and Street View imagery):

And here’s the side up close, from the wrap-around parking lot:

It doesn’t look exactly like an apartment building, and it isn’t located where apartment buildings are usually located (i.e., it’s right off the Interstate.) In fact, I’ve passed this building countless times and always wondered whether it began life some other way.

Well, it turns out it did, and there’s no big surprise here—it is what it looks like. It ties in with my Monday post, titled “Hotels to Housing.” Yep, this was a hotel—a pretty large one, in fact, especially for one with exterior corridors. And, aiding its conversion to housing, it had suites and kitchens, because it was an extended stay hotel.

Dan Reed, an urban planner in Maryland I know, remembered when it was a hotel, back in the late 1990s. It remained one up until about 2012. In fact, the conversion is so recent that Google Street View captures its hotel phase, and Yelp has a page with reviews and photos. Reed told me it used to be a Woodfin Suite Hotel, a small and now-discontinued brand. Googling “Woodfin Suites Rockville” confirms this: Google shows an image of the building, identifies it as Woodfin, and says that it is “permanently closed.” In more recent years, it was called Chase Suite Hotels, a successor company to Woodfin. (In its last year, it was yet another name, under the Choice Hotels banner.)

A bit of background on the hotel company: “Samuel A. Hardage, Marriott’s first Residence Inn franchisee, founded Chase Suite Hotels in 1996 and its predecessor company, Woodfin Suite Hotels, in 1985. The first Woodfin Suite Hotel opened in 1986, and the first Chase Suite Hotel opened in 1996.

If this conversion had taken place a few years earlier, it might take some of that good old-fashioned detective work to piece it back together. This time, the internet has captured it.

Here’s the Yelp page from its Chase Suite Hotel period, with several reviews going back to 2009, photos (it still had tube televisions!), and a property description. The building has over 200 suites, in 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom configurations, all with either kitchenettes or full kitchens.

In other words, a perfect apartment building, modest and reasonably priced for the area. Aging hotels, more than post-COVID office buildings, may be an underrated housing resource.

Is This Really a Strip Mall?

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