Architectural Record Municipal Grand featured in Architectural Record
We’re thrilled to share that AAmp’s transformation of a 1960s bank into Municipal Grand, a boutique hotel in Savannah, is featured in Architectural Record’s October issue. The article celebrates our passion for design that bridges eras, honoring the building’s midcentury legacy while infusing it with new life and warmth. Our sincere thanks to everyone who helped bring this project to life, and to Patrick Templeton for the wonderful feature!
Southern Comfort
AAmp Studio Adapts a 1960s Bank Building as a Luxury Hotel in Savannah’s Historic District
Savannah
By Patrick Templeton
Savannah, Georgia, is known more for its antebellum charm than its postwar chic. But, peppered among the Gothic Revival churches, Italianate mansions, and Neoclassical office buildings of the historic district, platted into a grid of lush subtropical squares and walkable blocks that accord with the 18th-century Oglethorpe plan, one finds the rectilinear volumes and gridded facades of 20th-century modernist architecture. AAmp Studio, the Toronto and Portland, Maine, firm founded by architects Andrew Ashey and Anne-Marie Armstrong in 2017, recently gave one such structure a new life—or, more accurately, a third life—as a 44-key luxury hotel.
Designed by Levy & Kiley Architects in 1961, the six-story building at the corner of Broughton and Abercorn streets originally housed the First Federal Savings & Loan Association. The bank’s facades featured large, framed white brises-soleil protruding from gray granite walls, a generous cantilevered concrete awning wrapping the corner, and blue and white ceramic tiles lining the exterior. The tiles continued inside in a 21-foot-high lobby, ringed by a mezzanine for lending offices. After the bank went through several name changes and ultimately bankruptcy, the city purchased the structure in 1991 and designated it the Broughton Municipal Building. Two decades later, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. With tourism and real-estate prices booming, in 2019, the city seized upon the opportunity to raise revenue by off-loading municipal assets, thus initiating the adaptive reuse.
When AAmp started work, it found the building stripped of all its modernist panache. The original blue and white tiles in the lobby were covered in beige vinyl laminate. The terrazzo floors were replaced with a brown carpet. Instead of the executive suites upstairs, “it was a rat’s nest of offices,” says Ashey. The louvers of the brises-soleil were removed and then lost in city storage. What did remain fell under historic-registry protection, leaving the architects with limited options for the conversion.
Working with local preservation specialists Ward Architecture, the designers adopted the approach of restoring the old and juxtaposing with the new. “You can’t mimic what was there, but you can’t be too different,” says Ashey. “That gives us this wonderful window to play in.” The vinyl laminate, which had the fortuitous effect of preserving the tile, was stripped, the brushed chrome railings were rejuvenated, and the carpet was replaced with new terrazzo and wood flooring. Where the bank’s original materials were cold and corporate, AAmp counterpoints with wood millwork, vibrant textiles, and bold patterns. For example, in the “all-day lobby,” which is first and foremost a restaurant, laid out with cozy banquettes and lounge tables—the primary guests’ entrance, reception desk, and elevators are tucked in one discreet corner—the designers paired the original 2-by-2 acrylic troffer lights with tall walnut-slat pendants, and a custom semicircular bar takes center stage.
To adapt the building from institutional use to hospitality, the architects parsed various strands of modernism, emphasizing material warmth and graphic dynamism, to both complement and soften Levy & Kiley’s design. AAmp’s custom flooring and fabric patterns were inspired by Brazilian modernist Roberto Burle Marx’s mosaics. Curving woodwork draws on the bentwood furniture of Alvar Aalto, while the mix of vivid colors, terrazzo, and marble recalls the Milanese Rationalism of figures like Gio Ponti.
The elevators serve as a microcosm of this design approach: original black terrazzo lines the walls of the elevator lobby, while the new cabins are clad in walnut, with oval mirrors framed in oak. The new flooring is a colorful triangle pattern. Upstairs, the same strategy is used for the rooms, each of which uniquely contorts to fit around existing structure and to align new partitions with the mullions of the aluminum curtain wall. The rooms, however, are unified by book-matched walnut millwork that houses the minibar and wardrobe and acts as a threshold between the dark green vestibules and sleeping area. The beds are rift-sawn oak with green velvet panels. “Everything we did, from the large scale of the bar and banquettes to the small scale of the millwork in the rooms, was to introduce softer edges and curves,” explains Ashey. “The formal softening of spaces is to make them more welcoming to people,” Armstrong adds.
Throughout the hotel, there are traces of the building’s past lives. For instance, the after-hours deposit box is the backdrop for the valet stand. The entrances are all typical commercial aluminum double doors. A mail chute occupies one wall of the ground-floor elevator lobby while, in the basement, a massive steel vault door leads to the hotel’s accounting office, and a second, smaller vault door bifurcates the gym. Even the bank teller desk, now mostly buried in a wall behind banquette seating, has been repurposed as a place to set a cocktail.
Crowning the design is the rooftop pool. More for lounging with a drink than for swimming laps, it is essentially constructed as a bathtub set within a plinth atop the roof. The pool is limited in size—11 feet wide, 30 feet long, and 3 feet deep—not by the capacity of the existing concrete structure but to avoid making the new plinth visible from the street. The prominently placed bar, pastel orange floor tiles, tropical plantings, “groovy” patterned cushions, and striped lounge chairs all give the poolside experience a very mod feel.
Municipal Grand is the second building in AAmp’s growing portfolio of hotels, following the Ramble in Denver, a 50-key property for the same client, designed to resemble a warehouse rehab and completed in 2018. Here, the studio contributed to the design of its public amenity spaces. A third hotel is underway in Portland, Maine, with a different client but a very similar brief to the Savannah project’s: the restoration and transformation of the 1909 Fidelity Trust Company Building into a 90-plus room hotel, with a vault turned speakeasy, set to wrap up next year. Though both are adaptive reuses of historic buildings, the 10-story Beaux-Arts tower poses a different stylistic challenge from Municipal Grand, and it will be interesting to see how AAmp rises to it. In Savannah, the “Hostess City of the South,” where the architects contended with the legacy of 1960s corporate architecture by integrating various strands of modernism, Municipal Grand radiates Southern comfort and hospitality through its material warmth, vibrancy, and softness.
Credits
Architect:
AAmp Studio — Andrew Ashey, Anne-Marie Armstrong, principals; Charlie Payne, project manager; Alexandra Kiss, Michelle Sterling, Ron Noble, Lena Ma, Jasmine Sykes, Theresa Watson, design team
Architect of Record:
Lynch Associates
Engineers:
Tharpe Structural Design (structural); Method Engineering Group (m/e/p); Coastal Civil Engineering (civil)
Consultants:
Ward Architecture + Preservation; AE Design (lighting); Canoe Hospitality (furniture); D.L. Adams Associates (acoustical)
General Contractor:
Choate Construction, Savannah
Client:
Midnight Auteur
Size:
36,850 square feet
Cost:
Withheld
Completion Date:
July 2025
Sources
Doors:
McCarthy
Interior Finishes:
Benjamin Moore, Wolf Gorden, Urban Revolutions, Monarch Plank, Look Walls & Interiors
Millwork:
New Standard Enterprises, Biscayne Hospitality
Flooring:
Daltile, Marazzi, Zia Tile, Concrete Collaborative, Tile Tech Pavers, Alarwool
Plumbing:
Jaclo, Kohler, California Faucets, Duravit, Rubinet, Signature Hardware, Toto
Lighting:
Modern Forms, In Common With, A+R, Vault Lighting, Allied Maker, Cedar & Moss, PLP, Menu Design Group, Currey & Company Lighting, Arhaus
Elevators:
Otis
