Ulysses – Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Where Baltimore eccentricity meets Art Deco glamour and unapologetic high camp.
Why DNA Hotels Loves It
● ASH turns a 1912 Italian Renaissance Revival landmark into a richly layered world inspired by Baltimore, literature, cinema and travel.
● Canopy beds, leopard-print carpets, handmade quilts and flamingo motifs prove maximalism can be sophisticated, witty and deeply considered.
● Ash—Bar and the gloriously mirrored Bloom’s extend the narrative beyond the bedrooms, making Ulysses as much a social stage as a hotel.
Baltimore Through the Looking Glass
Set in Mount Vernon, Baltimore’s grand historic and cultural district, Ulysses occupies the Latrobe Building, an Italian Renaissance Revival apartment building dating from 1912 and originally created for the city’s affluent bachelors. New York design studio and hotelier ASH approached its transformation as an exercise in storytelling rather than restoration alone. The resulting 116-room hotel draws from the building’s early-20th-century origins, Baltimore’s peculiarities and a wonderfully unlikely collection of references: Art Deco cinemas, Victorian interiors, ocean liners, steam trains, Indian craftsmanship and the gloriously subversive world of Baltimore-born filmmaker John Waters. Even the name has several stories. It references James Joyce’s Ulysses, Homer’s wandering Odysseus and the ship Ulysses, which brought Bavarian immigrants to Baltimore in the 19th century.
Maximalism with Meaning
Minimalism has little business here. Rooms come in four saturated colour worlds — cerise, citron, jade and azure — filled with scalloped canopy beds, patterned carpets, burled wood, claw-foot tubs, hand-beaded lampshades and vintage objects. Look closer and Baltimore reveals itself. Flamingos reference John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, while handmade quilts reinterpret the city’s 19th-century Baltimore Album Quilts. Pieces sourced from India and elsewhere add another layer to a hotel conceived around travel and discovery. There is plenty going on, but it never quite tips into theme-hotel territory. The theatricality is too deliberate for that.
Ash—Bar and Bloom’s
The public spaces turn the drama up further. Ash—Bar takes its cues from 1920s ocean liners, railway dining cars and old European cafés. Glossy burled wood, rattan and embroidered upholstery create the kind of place where breakfast can easily turn into a long afternoon over drinks. Bloom’s is its decadent alter ego. Named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses, the cocktail lounge mixes 1920s cabaret glamour with the hedonism of 1970s and early-1980s nightlife. Mirrors cover the bar, walls and ceiling; pink banquettes meet purple velvet, fringes and blood-red curtains. It feels simultaneously glamorous, mischievous and slightly surreal — which makes it very Baltimore.
A Hotel That Could Only Be Here
That sense of place is what saves Ulysses from becoming simply an exercise in extravagant interior design. ASH has taken Baltimore’s contradictions — stately and eccentric, historic and irreverent, cultured and camp — and turned them into the hotel’s identity. References to John Waters sit comfortably alongside classical architecture and literary allusions. Ulysses doesn’t merely occupy Baltimore. It embraces the city’s peculiarities and turns them into something seductive, intelligent and enormously fun.
