Johns Hopkins University is turning one of two adjacent, nearly century-old apartment buildings into a 115-room hotel, complete with a restaurant and meeting and conference spaces.
The Study at Johns Hopkins, a new branch for the Study Hotels brand owned by New York-based developer Hospitality 3, would take over the current Blackstone apartments at the corner of E. 33rd and N. Charles streets. The university said it’s aiming to open by summer 2021, and construction would begin next summer.
The Study Hotels brand also runs hotels at the University of Chicago, Yale University and Drexel University campuses.
“The community surrounding the university’s main campus has needed more hotel space for many years to accommodate visitors from around the world,” Mitch Bonanno, Hopkins’ chief real estate officer, said in a statement. “Study Hotels, which has created beautiful, welcoming spaces at other universities, offered an exciting plan for a hotel that will serve the needs of the university community and its neighbors and add to the vibrancy of the Charles Village Retail District.”
In addition to 115 rooms, the hotel–still subject to city design approval, and awaiting community feedback to ensure it complies with the North Charles Village Planned Unit Development–will have a 2,500-square-foot conference space and a “regionally inspired restaurant/bar,” per a release from the hotel company.
The university acquired the apartments in 2006 and renovated them the following year, the Johns Hopkins News-Letter student newspaper reported. Upon buying the properties in 2006, Hopkins said it hoped to eventually “incorporate the buildings into the university’s student housing system, providing increased opportunities for juniors and seniors to live in university residences.”
Apartment rates at the Charles and Blackstone currently range from $844 per month for an efficiency to just over $2,900 a month for a three-bedroom.
The university said all leases will expire next May, and “occupants affiliated with Johns Hopkins can receive assistance locating housing for next year that is comparable in price and location” by contracting the university’s Off-Campus Housing Office.
The university has undertaken three other projects nearby in Charles Village in recent years, including the Charles Commons, improvements to N. Charles Street and the Nine East 33rd development, which opened three years ago.
A previous version of this story incorrectly said both the Charles and Blackstone apartment buildings would be converted into the hotel, when in fact it’s just the Blackstone. We regret the error.
