Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head.

I didn’t know what to expect last summer when I boarded a train from New York to Baltimore. I’d been invited to stay at Guesthouse, a new boutique hotel run by the couple behind Good Neighbor, which Dwell previously profiled as one of the best independent design shops in the United States, so I expected to have a nice place to lay my head, but beyond that, I had no idea. I’d never been to Charm City before, and I associated it with little more than The Wire and John Waters. I didn’t even know if people really call it Charm City. I still don’t.

But when I tell you that I was changed by what I saw there—yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not exaggerating. Baltimore took this jaded New Yorker, worn down by years in the Big Apple’s competitive, fame-fueled design scene, and gave me hope for what a collaborative creative community could achieve. And there was good food. After my two-day visit getting to know local designers and the spaces they’re building together in Baltimore, I was daydreaming about the life I could be living on my train ride home.

Guesthouse sits on top of Good Neighbor, and as its name suggests, the store and cafe’s relaxed hangout vibe makes for an easy welcome into town. Its enormous terraced yard hosts a design festival each summer where local luminaries give talks and lead workshops open to the community. If you don’t have owners Shawn Chopra and Anne Morgan to show you around like I did, the lineups from those events provide a cheat sheet to getting the lay of the land. And, as I learned quickly, there’s a lot in the city to enjoy.

Tuesday

1 p.m.: I get to Guesthouse in the early afternoon after a five-minute cab ride from Baltimore’s Penn Station. The hotel is on a side street in the Hampden neighborhood, where Waters shot many of his movies, but the hotel and its sibling cafe/shop are much more subdued than what you’d see in Hairspray. They’d be easy to miss if it weren’t for the terraced hillside next-door that’s both a space for Good Neighbor’s outdoor cafe seating and a kind of billboard of activity announcing that this is a place for the artfully dressed to congregate.

Walking up the steps to the hotel entry is transportive. First, a porch with big jute rugs and Donald Juddesque furniture, buffered from the street by weathered steel guardrails and loads of plants, provides a hint of what’s to come. Then, the lobby. It smells like a hike in the Sierra Nevadas the day after you got a raise. Visually, it has the same vibe, a kind of groovy wooden dream accented by a steel beam running overhead and a large, moody painting by longtime local and Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald inset into the wall. It’s the sort of fancy space in which the Poughkeepsie kid in me feels instinctively like it doesn’t belong, but Justin Timothy Temple, good neighbor’s director of brand and marketing, is all smiles behind the light-brick front desk and puts me at ease.

While I’m getting set up, Chopra comes in to say hello, and he takes me on a tour of the hotel’s two floors, containing seven rooms in total. The rooms are decorated slightly differently, but they all continue the elevated earthy look and feel, outfitted with reclaimed hardwood floors and Hem furniture, and it continues to smell amazing, courtesy of Le Labo products throughout. Chopra and Morgan designed the spaces with Baltimore interior designer Ariana Grieu, and Good Neighbor’s in-house design team led by Alejandro Villasenor Garcia crafted the built-in furniture. Almost everything is shoppable; products from Good Neighbor populate the spaces, including some rippled glasses from Ferm Living and an Iris Hantverk wooden shoehorn. A couple windows in my room look out over the lawn, and after Chopra and I make plans for dinner and a tour of the city the next day, I head downstairs with my laptop to work for the afternoon.

With a gooey cheese sandwich from the cafe in hand, I find a seat in the shade by a collage mural by local artist SHAN Wallace and start triaging my inbox. It feels more like I’m in a calm public park than a cafe patio, a more pleasant place to work than the cramped Lower Manhattan coffee shops I’m used to.

6 p.m.: At dinner time, my city-envy grows when Chopra and Morgan take me to Clavel, a taqueria and mezcaleria opened by buzzy local restaurateur Lane Harlan and chef Carlos Raba closer to downtown. It has a stripped-back warehouse interior that’s warmer than the typical postindustrial food hall thanks to just the right amount of decorative baskets and textile wall art. Unfortunately, it’s full, but it has a takeout side next door with a small shop selling a selection of earthy ceramics and the like. A few marshmallowesque stools by local woodworker Kenny Johnston catch my eye and summarize the overall casual but considered aesthetic. We grab an assortment of tacos and mezcalitas and some space on the covered patio. It’s the sort of setup that would be twice as expensive and three times as crowded in New York, and I’d probably have to follow some obscure foodie Substack just to know how to get a reservation. But here, I sit back while the sun starts to set, and I feel my blood pressure slowly drop.

While we eat, Chopra and Morgan point out a massive brick block of a building across the street, which filmmakers and artists Maori Karmael Holmes, Elissa Blount Moorhead, and Terence Nance, among other Black creatives, are turning into a production facility called Lalibela. In a conversation with Solange Knowles for Interview, Nance said Lalibela will be “a well-equipped, sacred space to express cinema and all the other things we’re doing.” He’s also described it as part of “a generations-long process of intentional community” and a gradual congregation in Baltimore of Black creatives from around the country. It’s part of a growing number of Black-run art spaces that have opened across Baltimore the past few years. Scholar and curator Joy Davis opened Waller Gallery, which primarily features artists of color, in 2017, and The Last Resort Artist Retreat, founded by Baltimore native and artist Derrick Adams, opened earlier this year and hosts Black artists for residencies.

Chopra and Morgan tell me about their own route to Baltimore and becoming purveyors of fine design. Neither has a background in the field. Chopra was a physical therapist, and Morgan is still a dentist, and though they long had creative yearnings, they say their parents encouraged them into stable medical fields, which they both attribute to their parents’ immigrant anxieties and aspirations. Though neither grew up in Baltimore, they found themselves there for work and settled in well enough to be able to pivot professionally. I marvel that they’ve been able to create all this while raising a young child, and I struggle to find time to make dinner every night.

Wednesday

9 a.m.: The next morning, after enjoying a coffee in my room in a surprisingly comfortable donut-shaped Hem chair, I meet Chopra downstairs for our city tour. Joining us is Michael Haskins Jr., a Baltimore fashion and furniture designer who founded Currency Studio here in 2007 and is now working on opening his first brick-and-mortar store. He tells me how much Good Neighbor and its summer festivals have brought the local design scene together. It sounds nice, but to my jaded New York design editor ears, it also sounds a bit like the many press releases touting “community-oriented design” and $10,000 vases that have populated my inbox in the past couple of years. Surprise shooed away my skepticism while we were swinging by Good Neighbor’s workshop/office down the street and Academy Award–winning cinematographer Bradford Young stopped in to say hello. “Smalltimore,” Chopra tells me, is how people refer to this city where you can’t help but bump into your local Oscar winner on your way to work. Even if this run-in was orchestrated as part of a PR charm offensive, I’m getting more convinced that Chopra and Morgan are actually bringing people together.

10 a.m.: I’m even more persuaded when we stop by the studios of a few of the designers and artisans who helped put Guesthouse together. First we head to Union Collective, an old Sears warehouse now filled with a brewery, ice cream factory, wine bar, and workshops for specialty fabricator Luke Works and Area, a maker of wooden furniture. Mark Melonas and Kim Scott of Luke Works walk me through the mold-making and casting process for an intricate concrete sink that’s in one of the hotel’s powder rooms inspired by Indian stepwells. Chopra talks about how he brought in influences from his Indian background and Morgan’s Egyptian heritage while collaborating with Baltimore creatives on outfitting the hotel space. It’s a thread that continues at our next stop, Blue Light Junction, a natural dye studio in an old warehouse just north of downtown in the Station North Arts District.

11 a.m.: Walking into Blue Light Junction is one of those moments where I remember why I ever got into design. Its founder, Kenya Miles, brings us through an unassuming brick facade into a raw workspace where strings of drying indigo and marigolds dangle from the rafters, gentle daylight glowing through them from small skylights. More flowers fill a large table over which faceted fabric lamps hang. Haskins helps finish the scene by turning off the room’s large work lights, leaving only the hanging lanterns glowing through skins that I now see are dyed in Rorschach-like prints. Chopra tells me that Miles dyed papyrus that he and Morgan brought back from Egypt and used as cabinetry paneling in the guest rooms, another subtle way the couple mixed their backgrounds into the hotel.

Upstairs, we meet Jorgelina Lopez of La Loupe, which produced the pendants I’d been marveling over downstairs. Lopez and her partner, Marco Duenas, are designers in residence in a shared studio space where she tells me how the duo worked with Miles on dyeing their wares using flowers from the studio’s gardens and from elders throughout the area. I paw through scraps of silk turned golden, and Miles shows me some of her earlier textile designs featuring abstract blue line drawings on ocher backgrounds. The capitalist in me can’t help but urge her to make more and sell them online because they are the perfect thing to hang framed by my bed, but it’s refreshing to be in a design space where the pressures of profit seem less oppressive and the focus is more about people coming together to share their skills. (Still, my inner Adam Smith is eased when Miles tells me about Blue Light’s concept store, opening soon.)

12 p.m.: For lunch I split from the group and take Haskins’s suggestion to try Ekiben, an Asian fusion restaurant with three locations in the city, one in Hampden. The first location opened in 2016, founded by three friends who met at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. It’s not particularly design-y, but the fried chicken hits the spot, and the servings are generous even for someone who has been known to order two entrees for dinner.

1:30 p.m.: I meet Haskins for an afternoon walk around the Baltimore Museum of Art, the sort of encyclopedic museum where you could wander all day. We talk about the benefits of the gentler pace of creative industries in Baltimore compared to cities like New York or Los Angeles, as well as the challenges of working somewhere that design tastemakers often overlook. But as he talks about a couple local arts development projects he’s involved in and the ease with which he seems to find collaborators, I wonder if the grass really is greener here.

4 p.m.: My cynicism creeps a bit back in after I split with Haskins and head to the waterfront, where I catch a water taxi to Federal Hill, which overlooks the harbor. I’m too late to make it into the American Visionary Art Museum, but I bookmark it, along with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, Walters Art Museum, and the historic Peabody Library, for my next visit. I am able to wander around Harborplace, the 1980s mall-like development that my grad school real estate professor regaled as a defining project of late 20th-century American urbanism. Now mostly empty, I appreciate it more as a place to quickly use a bathroom, and I hope that the community being built by Good Neighbor, Lalibela, and other creative hubs in Baltimore will prove more enduring than this Disneyfied harbor experience.

6 p.m.: My outlook improves again when I walk back downtown and stop for a martini at Ulysses, another new design hotel in the city, this one is from national hotelier Ash, which has also opened trendy spots in Detroit, New Orleans, and Providence, Rhode Island. Ash–Bar at Ulysses is sumptuous and kitschy, burl veneer covering the walls and bright-red embroidered cushions on banquettes—glam irony with an eclectic crowd. The martini goes down easy and I consider another but remember that this is a work trip, and my managing editor instincts scoot me along. Dinner is at Le Comptoir du Vin, a rustic wine bar recommended by Chopra. Not two, but three different tables in the small backyard patio happened to know each other. One of the tables is on a first date, and a kind of theatrical hush takes over the space while the potential couple chat about work and life and debate about where to find good pizza. Smalltimore, my gin-tinged brain reminds me. Charm city.

Thursday

9 a.m.: I wake up refreshed, thanks to my room’s Avocado mattress, but a little sad to be leaving so soon. I console myself with the thought that I can return; though this stay is comped, I check Guesthouse’s regular rates and see that they’re within the splurge-able range even for those of us not making six figures.

Just one field trip today, this one with designer Jesse Hill, who meets me downstairs and gives me a ride to his studio at Mill No. 1, one of a few redeveloped brick industrial buildings along Jones Falls, a stream that runs through town. Hill, who has his own eponymous studio, cut his teeth as a designer of DeWalt tools and Herman Miller furniture and still collaborates with brands around the world. We talk about how American design often still isn’t as respected internationally as, say, Danish or Japanese work despite a long history of high-quality manufacturing. Hill points to companies like Emeco, which started in Baltimore and helped foster a local network of technicians that can still whip things up for designers who know how to ask. It strikes me as a failure of branding as much as anything, and the failure of editors and writers like me who often focus narrowly on U.S. cities like L.A. and New York and only occasionally airdrop into other locations.

1 p.m.: The winds of work blow me back to Good Neighbor’s terraced yard, but before I crack open my laptop I check out Green Neighbor, the plant shop at the top of the hill. It’s a partnership with local plant stylist Hilton Carter, who became famous during the pandemic’s lockdown years when so many of us were noodling all day with our fiddle leaf figs. I have no room for more plants at home, but I pick up a couple clever pot trays from La Vie Botanique for friends.

6 p.m.: Eventually it’s time for me to check out, and assistant manager Stephanie Nesmith helps me. She’s relatively new to the city and we talk about how much she’s enjoying settling in. Earlier, Eliseba Osore, Good Neighbor’s director of operations and growth, helped me at the front desk and talked to me about how she previously started ShareBaby, a Baltimore-based diaper bank. I wonder if Chopra and Morgan’s relative newness to design is part of why they’ve been able to build connections across disciplines and bring people together in a less competitive way. I regret I can’t stay longer but I’m curious what I can do with this inspiration when I get back to New York.

On my train ride home, I look up the Charm City moniker and see it was a marketing invention of the same era that created the mall-ified Harborplace. Mental note not to use it in conversation. Fortunately, the charm of today’s Baltimore speaks for itself.

Top photo by Justin Timothy Temple, courtesy Good Neighbor

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