How an Iowa Mill Turned a Luxurious Hotel
The lodge elaborate is uniquely Amana from the customer’s initial step into the lobby. The style staff incorporated aged equipment from the mill. On the remaining, the yarn wall is a nod to the woolen manufacturing that nonetheless happens on site.
Adaptive reuse is one particular of the greenest making strategies out there. Presenting an option to demolition and new construction, adaptive reuse—the observe of using an old building or web-site, preserving what is best about it and using it for a objective other than what it was initially created for—repurposes structures that may well otherwise be demolished and creates anything new and enjoyable from them.

After downsizing and modifications in the textile marketplace, lots of of the structures in the Amana mill advanced were empty or underused. An adaptive reuse job transformed them into a luxury boutique lodge with ample gathering room.
Lodge Millwright, a new luxury boutique hotel in Amana, Iowa, is a shining example of this apply. At first founded as a flourishing woolen mill in 1855, what is now Resort Millwright was when the industrial centre of the village of Amana. The textiles manufactured there were being offered across the region and obtained a countrywide name for excellent and craftsmanship, one thing the Amana Colonies (a team of 7 villages in the Amana space) are nonetheless recognized for these days.
“The Amana Colonies are a Nationwide Historic Landmark, a single of Iowa’s leading visitor points of interest and a top historic attraction,” describes Jeff Popenhagen, main revenue officer of the Amana Culture. “Preserving the physical constructions that are an vital portion of Amana’s tale and employing individuals structures in ways that rejoice that tale is critical to protecting this Iowa treasure.”
The road from previous mill to boutique lodge was extended, but really worth it, manufacturing a genuine gem in the Jap Iowa hospitality scene. Here’s how it transpired.
Building a Hotel from Historic Buildings
The resort sophisticated is portion of an 8-acre location following to the Mill Race Canal. It originally hosted 13 structures, but around time, downsizing and alterations in the industry remaining lots of of the buildings vacant or underutilized.
The Amana Society, a legacy corporation that safeguards the area’s heritage and will work to distribute Amana Colonies goods nationwide, wanted to protect the story of the internet site, and that provided saving the historic buildings uncovered in the mill advanced.
The Amana Culture introduced in 3rd-social gathering corporations to discover the best uses of the web site to assure its economic steadiness and identified that the ideal approach was “a multi-use solution that boosts Amana’s placement as a hospitality and amusement location,” Popenhagen describes.

The mill advanced initially provided 13 structures. It’s now the household of a luxury boutique lodge with 65 visitor rooms, two comfy accumulating spaces and 7,000 square toes of celebration house.
The adaptive reuse job converting the mill complicated into a luxurious boutique resort location wasn’t quick, notes Matt Hansen, project supervisor with Compass Professional Products and services. The locations of windows, beams and columns presented complications in the first layout. Compass integrated columns and beams into new walls and creatively framed all-around home windows.
Even further complicating the system, the mill complicated had been rebuilt about a 40-12 months span right after a 1923 fireplace, which “resulted in far more than eight additions causing obstacles with the interior flooring elevations and, in some cases, minimal ceiling heights,” Hansen states. “Blessed with very long and vast corridors, we could lower flooring elevations with new elevators and ramps.”
Bringing the elaborate up to present code was also a obstacle. The intricate desired new code-compliant staircases, elevators, doorways and hardware, as effectively as new mechanical, electrical, plumbing and sprinkler units on all new walls and other places exactly where they ended up desired in the existing structure, Hanson points out.
Their difficult function paid off. The Midwestern oasis is now open for business enterprise, that includes a comprehensive-support, two-tale lodge with 65 guest rooms, creatively built accumulating spaces and substantial celebration space. And, accurate to its heritage, textile workers are however hard at do the job nowadays in the complex’s historic weaving developing, which now involves a 7,000-sq.-foot event house known as Merino Loft. Weavers make blankets and baggage readily available at retailers in Amana, as nicely as mattress scarves and other accent pieces for Lodge Millwright.

Relaxing guest rooms include Amana woolens generated on site.
Hotel Millwright Now
The lodge site is a celebration of all matters Amana. Stroll through the lodge advanced to uncover wheels, pulleys, gears, levers and push shafts left hanging in their first properties.
“The tools dates back again to when the Mill Race canal powered the mill, exactly where it was restored and situated all through the lodge,” Popenhagen suggests. “The blending of outdated with new showcases the mill structures’ beauty and character and highlights the hotel’s distinctive on-web-site services.”
Major devices and equipment blend with soft woolens, heat woods and exposed brick to generate a glimpse that is uniquely Amana. In just about every space, images of millwrights and mill employees tell the story of what happened in the place, linking the earlier with the existing.
Visitors can see how the lobby was reworked from a former boiler area or how the Electrical Thread Social Club, a whiskey bar serving craft spirits and tiny bites, stands in which the mill at the time met the h2o.
“We wished to maintain factors uncomplicated and enable the mill’s historic factors, pictures, art and artifacts do the chatting,” clarifies Sara Montgomery, imaginative director of the Amana Society.
The interior design and style also attracts on community inspiration. The Amana Colonies are known for wonderful handcrafted goods, and the resort complex reflects that—not just with the textiles produced on-web page, but with pieces established by the Amana Household furniture Store organized artfully through the corridors. Even the flight boards in the Electric powered Thread Social Club were created by gifted Amana woodworkers.
These disparate components come collectively to produce a web site that both honors its roots and looks toward the potential. As Popenhagen says, “Hotel Millwright is now a position for reminiscences, a spot for stories and a spot to share the local community.”