Inspīr Embassy Row, Washington, D.C.
Located on Washington, D.C.’s illustrious Embassy Row, the iconic Fairfax Hotel was originally built in 1924 as postwar officer’s housing before becoming a favorite destination for politicians, diplomats, and celebrities in the 1960s. Decades later, in 1985, the Fairfax Hotel was significantly expanded with an annex to the west, and underwent a series of ownership changes, including operating as a Ritz-Carlton property in the 1980s and ’90s. When the hotel closed in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Maplewood Senior Living (Westport, Conn.) purchased the property.
As a prestigious architectural landmark, Maplewood saw the former hotel as a prime location to expand its upscale contemporary urban brand, Inspīr, with its second location. “Looking at this beautiful building with its tremendous historical pedigree on Embassy Row, we wanted to honor its history, prestige, and cultural significance while also honoring the Inspīr brand promises of wellness, hospitality, and elevated care,” says Maplewood co-CEO Tom Gaston.
The senior living operator commissioned Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB) Architects & Planners (Washington, D.C.) as the architect and interior design team for Inspīr Embassy Row, drawing on the firm’s expertise restoring historic urban buildings. Through a gut renovation, the design team crafted a hospitality-inspired environment that embraces the building’s original style while reimaging luxury living to support seniors with assisted living and memory care needs.
Inspīr Embassy Row prioritizes wellness and hospitality design
The $200 million, 215,000-square-foot community features 178 units spanning studio and one- and two-bedroom options on floors two through eight, alongside a full suite of luxury amenities—from the lower-level Sanctuary wellness suite housing a saltwater pool, sauna, steam room, and fitness center to a new rooftop patio boasting expansive views of downtown D.C. “While it is a preeminent healthcare facility that focuses tremendously on wellness, the design is residential and hospitality forward,” says Jill Cavanaugh, partner-in-charge at BBB.
Specifically, the design approach at Inspīr Embassy Row draws on BBB’s urban planning expertise to define clear paths and distinct landmarks throughout the facility, naturally guiding residents toward amenities.
“When you design cities, you create landmarks, and you create nodes along a path to reach those landmarks, like distinct neighborhoods,” Cavanaugh says. “We applied that to this sprawling floor plan to create meaningful destinations that each have their own visual character with very clear sightlines and generous wide paths to get there and, at the end of those paths, a landmark: a big fireplace, lovely piece of artwork, an immediate sense of orientation.”
The Marketplace amenity hub
For example, just past the first-floor lobby inside the main entrance, a cluster of amenities dubbed The Marketplace provide familiar conveniences including a coffee bar, mailroom, art room, and lounge flanked by cozy reading nooks and comfy couches.
“Very often, people with different levels of mental acuity have agitation, apprehension, and fearfulness in unfamiliar places,” Cavanaugh says. “We wanted to mitigate that through intuitive wayfinding by giving people a sense of purpose through space, so The Marketplace creates routines where they can get coffee and a newspaper in the morning or grab a cocktail with a friend in the evening. Along the way to these destinations, we created areas where people could sit and chat to allow for unplanned interactions.”
As residents progress from the lobby down the main corridor of The Marketplace amenities, the design gradually transitions from light to dark—not only delineating one space from the next but also indicating the time of day that each room is most likely to be active. For example, the Garden Bistro, located at the front of the building next to the lobby, is a bright, daylit lunch destination filled with greenery and access to an outdoor terrace.
At the end of the hallway sits the Ember Lounge, which is designed as a cozier, more intimate space that pays homage to the former hotel’s famed Jockey Club. Here, dark leather chairs, heavy textiles, and wood paneling with detailed millwork “deliberately ensconce you in the environment,” Cavanaugh says, while a massive white marble fireplace, visible from the corridor, anchors the space. “The oversized fireplace was intentionally designed to function both on the building scale as a landmark at the end of the path,” Cavanaugh says, “but also within the space to create a sense of hearth and warmth.”
Inspīr Embassy Row navigates adaptive reuse challenges
Adapting a historic hotel into a contemporary senior living facility posed several challenges for the project team. For starters, the building’s W-shaped footprint featured a significant grade change on the first level, formed by the junction between the original 1920s construction and the 1980s addition that doubled the building’s footprint. Inside the entrance to the new addition, visitors encountered several stairs, which “would be problematic for our seniors,” Gaston says. To bypass this obstacle, the project team repositioned the lobby to the on-grade entrance off of Massachusetts Avenue, as well as infilled portions of the concrete slab.
Additionally, altering the number of elevators from three to two in order to enlarge one of the shafts to fit a stretcher and enable two-way access resolved both life safety issues and accessibility challenges, particularly “the half-floor grade difference between the 1920 original building and the 1980 addition,” Cavanaugh says.
Meanwhile, a new fire stairwell was added to comply with egress and distance requirements, while another was removed so the shaft could be repurposed into vertical chases for fresh air ducts, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. “Creating vertical penetrations through the building was probably the largest challenge,” she says, because the ductwork had to line up with the floor plans on each level, which fluctuated depending on the unit mix and layout.
To arrange a variety of units within the irregular building shape, the project team approached each floor as a puzzle—creating 178 unique units. Guided by feedback from residents at Inspīr Carnegie Hill, Maplewood’s first Inspīr brand location, which opened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2021, the units at the newest location are larger and designed for future flexibility.
The latter is based on a resident’s request at the Carnegie Hill community to buy the one-bedroom unit next door to expand their living space without moving—an idea that Maplewood decided to incorporate into Embassy Row. “As part of our design thought process, we built in the ability to combine rooms if we need to, because we’re seeing that as a common trend these days,” Gaston says. “People are wanting more space.”
To ensure accessibility for residents, the building also required zero-threshold floor plans with seamless, level transitions. Smoothly threading in new mechanical systems and inlaid flooring was more straightforward on the newer side of the building, thanks to its concrete slab foundation, but the original construction’s structural hollow-tile flat-arch floor system proved more challenging, Cavanaugh explains.
“Each of the concrete ribs in this terracotta slab need to be penetrated in a way that doesn’t compromise that rib, so we had to use ground-penetrating radar to investigate underneath the structure,” she says. “You’re threading mechanical systems through these vertical penetrations in a way that serves the units above without compromising accessibility within the unit itself, so you’re working vertically and horizontally at the same time. Finessing these new systems through the building was the largest technical challenge.”
Inspīr Embassy Row’s floorplan capitalizes on outdoor connections
The unusual W-shaped floorplan of Inspīr Embassy Row created unique opportunities for the project team to bring in daylight, create outdoor access, and capitalize on sweeping views of the surrounding city. “It’s not a terribly deep building because it’s not a rectangle, so we were able to minimize the corridor length and take advantage of the natural light, which is critical for seniors,” says Gaston.
On the backside of the building, the junction of the original building and the addition created “a significant irregularity” that jutted out from the structure, Cavanaugh says. By carving out this protrusion, “we created space on the second and third floors for outdoor terraces,” she says.
The addition of these patios made the second and third floors a fit for housing memory care. “It was really important to us that memory care residents have full-time access to outdoor space,” Gaston explains. These open-air patios “are designed to get fresh air, outdoor space, and light, but also allow privacy and protection with features like trellises or raised walls to prevent people or objects from falling,” Cavanaugh adds.
The design team created additional outdoor access for residents by transforming the rooftop, which previously housed mechanical equipment for the hotel. Now, an indoor bar and lounge open onto an expansive rooftop terrace featuring fire pits, meditation areas, gardens, and sweeping views across downtown D.C., including the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral. “Residents who can’t leave the building still have the opportunity to feel as if they’re part of the city, engaging in something larger,” Cavanaugh says.
[Since the facility opening in January 2025, feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Gaston says, with resident families, institutional partners, and even competitors touring the facility.
Cavanaugh adds that the community feels intuitive and inviting, giving residents the feeling of a sense of purpose, hospitality, warmth, and wellness. “The way in which each space has a distinct aesthetic translates to a sense of familiarity and feeling like you’re home,” she says.
Brooke Bilyj is a freelance writer and owner of Bantamedia (Cleveland) and can be reached at [email protected].
Inspīr Embassy Row project details
Location: Washington, D.C.
Completion date: February 2025
Owner: Omega Healthcare Investors
Developer: Maplewood Senior Living
Operator: Maplewood Senior Living
Total building area: 215,000 sq. ft.
Total construction cost: $200 million
Cost/sq. ft.: $930
Architect: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners
Interior designer: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners
Construction Manager: Turner
Engineers: Cosentini Associates, TYLin, Gordon DC, MKSK, Claude R. Engle, Clevenger Frable LaVallee, Steven Winter Associates, Intertek, Acoustics2, Jensen Hughes, Fortune Shepler Saling, Rosa D. Cheney, AIA, PLLC
Art consultant: Debbie Morton, Morton Contemporary
Art/pictures: Procured by Morton Contemporary
AV equipment/electronics/software: ENSEO, Care Predict, Health Signals, Samsung
Carpet/flooring: Signature Flooring, Artistic Tile, Daltile, Florim, Parky, Nydree, Stonetech
Ceiling/wall systems: Armstrong
Doors/locks/hardware: Pella, Joseph Giles, Salto
Fabric/textiles: Perennials, ArcCom, Kravet
Furniture—seating/casegoods: George Smith, Samuelson, Cselect
Handrails/wall guards: Julius Blum
Lighting: Yellow Goat Design, Lutron
Signage/wayfinding: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners
Surfaces—solid/other: Dekton, Caesarstone
Wallcoverings: Wolf Gordon, Koroseal
Salt Room, Sauna & Steam Room: Perfect Wellness
Millwork: Beaubois
Decorative Metal Trim: Schluter
Fitness Equipment: TechnoGym
Movable Glass Partitions: Solar Innovations
Unit Appliances: Bosch and GE
Bathroom Fixtures: American Standard and Grohe
Elevators: Kone
Project details are provided by the design team and not vetted by Environments for Aging.
