May 16, 2026

Converted Motor Lodges: A Photo Essay

The mid-century motor lodge as design object

Sometime around 2013, the Northeast hospitality scene figured out that the easiest way to open a distinctive boutique hotel — without the permitting cost of new construction or the renovation complexity of a Victorian — was to buy a mid-century roadside motel, strip it down, and do something interesting with the exterior architecture that was already there.

The result has become a recognizable sub-genre. Single-story or two-story motor-lodge building with rooms opening directly to the parking lot. Updated with a restrained Scandinavian-leaning interior palette. Strong graphic signage. A pool, usually. A restaurant or bar in the former office. Light wood, muted paint, consistent room type across the property.

A dozen of these have opened in the Northeast in the last decade, mostly in the Catskills, Hudson Valley, North Fork, and Hamptons. They share enough visual language that the category now operates almost as a shorthand. Here's the canon.

The Graham & Co. — Phoenicia, NY

The Graham & Co. is, by most accounts, the hotel that started the category. Opened 2013 by a Brooklyn team (Leisure Team, originally), in a former motor lodge on Route 214 in Phoenicia. Twenty rooms. Pool. Campfire in the evening. Minimal everything. Graphic designer's dream exterior — big block numerals on the room doors, Sharp Swiss-influenced signage on the road.

Graham & Co. was the first motor-lodge conversion in the region that photographed well enough to spawn imitators. By 2016, at least four other Catskills motels had been bought, renovated in the Graham & Co. vocabulary, and reopened.

Scribner's Catskill Lodge — Hunter, NY

Scribner's opened in 2016 on the old Scribner's Lodge property on a hillside in Hunter. Thirty-eight rooms, an on-site restaurant (Prospect), a bar program that takes itself seriously, and a view that's among the best of any Catskills hotel.

Scribner's leaned further into the Scandi-design-motel aesthetic than Graham & Co. — lighter wood, cleaner lines, more consistent room finish. It's the property that made the Catskills-Scandi-motel more of a regional default than a Phoenicia-specific curiosity.

Eastwind Windham — Windham, NY

Eastwind Windham opened 2018, adding a wrinkle: it combined Scandi-motel rooms with Lushna glamping cabins, plus a wood-barrel sauna. The lodge building is genuinely a 1940s motor-court-style structure, converted in the Graham & Co. / Scribner's vocabulary, but Eastwind's addition of the sauna and the cabins made it more of a destination than a roadside stop.

The Eastwind approach has since been repeated and expanded at Eastwind Oliverea Valley, which is the same brand's more polished second property. Oliverea is less motor-lodge and more lodge-lodge — a real departure — but shares the design vocabulary.

Starlite Motel — Mount Tremper, NY

Starlite Motel took the Wes Anderson approach to the genre. Pink and turquoise doors. Shaker-simple interiors. A specific color-story that's both obviously a motel and obviously a curated experience. Opened mid-2010s in Mount Tremper, which means it's five minutes from Foxfire and eight from Phoenicia — right in the heart of the Catskills Bohemian corridor.

Smaller than most of its peers, and for that reason often the best-value option in the category on off-peak weekends.

Silver Sands — Greenport, NY

Silver Sands is the North Fork's contribution. A rejuvenated beachfront motel with 1,400 feet of private sand on Long Island Sound. Condé Nast Readers' Choice 2024.

Silver Sands's conversion kept more of the original 1950s signage and color palette than most of the Catskills peers — the pink, the neon, the wood-shingle walls. It's the motor-lodge revival that leans most toward historical preservation and least toward design-overhaul.

Sound View Greenport — Greenport, NY

Also North Fork. Sound View is a 1950s roadside motel redone with a different sensibility than Silver Sands — cleaner, more Scandi, restaurant-forward (the restaurant, Halyard, takes itself seriously). Opened 2017. Probably the most polished of the North Fork motor-lodge conversions.

Tourists — North Adams, MA

Tourists is the Berkshires' entry and arguably the most architecturally significant of any hotel in this category. 48 rooms in a reimagined '60s motor lodge, Sea Ranch-inspired cedar-and-steel buildings stepping down the Hoosic River. Co-owned by Wilco's bassist John Stirratt and Benjamin Svenson; designed by Svenson's firm.

Tourists isn't really a motor-lodge conversion in the same sense as Graham & Co. — much more was rebuilt than preserved. But it sits in the same conceptual lineage: taking a failed mid-century road hotel and turning it into a design object.

Marram Montauk — Montauk, NY

Marram Montauk brought the motor-lodge vocabulary to the Hamptons' old motel row on Montauk's oceanfront. Creamy palette, dune-and-sea aesthetic, proper scale. It's one of the few hotels on that stretch that's both genuinely independent and visually coherent with the broader Northeast motor-lodge category.

Journey East Hampton — East Hampton, NY

Journey East Hampton is the South Fork's minimalist motor-lodge revival. Playing the Piaule role for the Hamptons — quieter, cleaner, less chintzy than most East Hampton inventory.

Hotel Dylan — Woodstock, NY

Hotel Dylan is the outlier. A Woodstock-native Robert Novogratz-designed revival of a '70s bi-level motel. Turntables in every room. Less Scandi, more mid-century-eclectic — the Novogratz sensibility is about color and pattern rather than Scandinavian restraint. But structurally it belongs in this canon: mid-century roadside motel, reimagined for design-aware weekenders.

What they share

All of the above are independently owned. None are Auberge, Lark, Main Street Hospitality, or similar multi-property collections. This matters because the motor-lodge conversion is almost a litmus test for independent hotel ownership — it's the kind of project that requires a specific idiosyncratic taste (you have to want to do this with a '50s motel rather than build a new hotel from scratch) that usually only single operators have.

All keep some structural memory of the original building: the single-story room-opens-to-parking layout, the big block numerals, the graphic signage, the pool-in-the-courtyard arrangement.

All — this is the key point — are restorations, not demolitions and rebuilds. The Graham & Co. is still, recognizably, the motel it was in 1968. Scribner's is still the lodge it was in 1972. That preservation ethic is the category's unifying virtue.

What the category is not

Not every "design motel" is a motor-lodge conversion. Piaule Catskill, Camptown, and The Bend Resort are new-build architectural cabins — a different category entirely. Not motel conversions.

And not every motor-lodge-era building that's been renovated is part of this aesthetic tradition. There are plenty of mid-century motels in the Catskills that have simply been upgraded with new mattresses and flat-screens; those aren't in this canon. The category we're describing requires a specific design ambition — the intent to turn the building into an object.

What's next

The motor-lodge conversion category is maturing. The first wave of conversions (2013-2016) is now on its second decade of operation and the question is whether the design-forward operators can keep the properties feeling fresh without losing what made them distinctive in the first place. Graham & Co. has held up well. Scribner's has evolved slowly. Others have struggled.

A few new motor-lodge conversions are reportedly in the pipeline for 2026-2027, mostly in underserved Hudson Valley and Vermont markets. The category's not dead; it's just past the novelty phase.