Going back and forth on stars for this one. Me and around 30 of my coworkers came into town for a…read moretwo day workshop and they got us a room block at this hotel. I ended up being in the North Building and cracked up when I walked into my room and saw I was in one of the Lightwell Lofts (a few of us ended up in them by chance, guess they included them in our room block lol). While the room was super cool and beautiful, there was a lot to be desired.
After taking a million photos of the gorgeous room, I quickly realized a major flaw - the bedroom is upstairs, the bathroom is downstairs, and the staircase between the two is a crazy narrow spiral staircase. As someone that gets up to pee in the middle of the night, having to traverse the spiral stairs was terrifying lol. One of my coworkers actually swapped with someone who had a "normal" room because he was worried about falling down the stairs.
My downstairs tv wouldn't turn on. I fiddled with the remote a bit, tried rearranging the batteries, but couldn't turn it on. I used the ipad in the room to put in a maintenance request, but no one came. I figured I would just let the front desk know when I headed out to dinner that night. Hours later, the front desk calls me to see if anyone had come to fix the tv - they hadn't. The girl was very nice and apologetic, she said I sent the request in the middle of a shift change and someone had accidentally marked it as complete. So she said someone would be right up, and he did come up. Handed me a handwritten note and a $25 coupon for Coppin's which was totally unexpected and a very nice gesture. Turned out, he knew exactly what the problem was - he said the remote was broken and he was supposed to swap it out but forgot. Gave me a new remote and all was good. He also mentioned there is a second remote upstairs for that tv. After he left, I went to look for it - there was no second remote.
We held our meetings in the Scheper Room, which was also beautiful. The room was absolutely freezing the first day and I'm someone that prefers it a touch colder and was uncomfortable. We had to get them to update the thermostat and then in the afternoon it was way too hot. We had food brought in from the hotel and it was all fine, nothing super memorable. There was soup at lunch but the sign didn't even say what it was - just "chef's choice." The Italian hoagies were way too big and needed to be cut in half, I couldn't even finish half of one. The salad with fruit/pecans/etc was my favorite though. They had the completely wrong password on the tables for the Wifi but thankfully we figured it out quickly that we just had to use the room password. The second day for breakfast, there was yogurt on the menu and even on the sign with all the food - but there was no yogurt. Some of my coworkers were specifically asking for yogurt so we had to request it directly because it was included and paid for. Box lunches to take to go on the second day which were fine, I had the chicken caesar salad wrap.
Housekeeping didn't come to service my room until 5pm when I was in there getting ready for dinner, so I was not able to get the room serviced. Just asked them for some more coffee. My conditioner in the shower was empty but I didn't bother reporting it after the tv issue and I had my own conditioner with me, so used that. The lotion at the sink was so thick that I could not get it out of the bottle at all, I had to use q-tips to get it out (it was nice quality, just kinda useless if you can't get it out of the bottle lol).
Great local offerings on the mini bar and in the fridge. My coworkers and I got a kick out of the "intimacy kits" because we were on a business trip haha. The Magic 8 ball was fun, I loved the conversation cards even though I just read a few of them to myself haha. Even with the bedroom upstairs, it was nice to have the big double closet in the bathroom hallway so I really was just in the loft to sleep and kept all my stuff downstairs. The location is great, lots of fun stuff right nearby. The courtyard is lovely.
I would say this is a solid 3.5 stars but since we can't give half stars, I'll give it a 4 because the staff was overall very nice and quickly fixed any issues, just a little annoying that we had any issues at all.