St. Paul’s new boutique hotel repackages a history that would make a mother—or a sister—proud. St. Agatha’s Conservatory of Music and Arts, which called itself the first fine arts school in Minnesota, was founded in 1884 by the Sisters of St. Joseph, housing not only the school but serving as a convent for the nuns who taught there.  At its peak, the convent housed more than 90 sisters, and the school had an enrollment of more than 1,100 students.  The namesake of the hotel, Mother Celestine Howard oversaw the fundraising and construction of the six-story, 59,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts-style building.

It continued as a conservatory and convent until 1962, at which point it was converted to office space, eventually housing the administrative offices of the McNally Smith College of Music. When McNally Smith suddenly shuttered its doors in late 2017, the owners began shopping the space. They found a willing buyer in Rebound Hospitality.

The result is a 72-room boutique hotel and event space that has changed everything without changing anything.  For instance, in the matching front parlors—one the hotel bar, the other the front desk—the ornate trim is largely original, as are the fireplaces with tiles painted by hand by some of the first sisters in the house.  Much of the wood trim has been saved, the terrazzo flooring buffed and shined, and many large wall paintings by the sisters who once resided there were sent to the Museum Services of Minneapolis for restoration and returned to the building for display.

MAKING IT WORK (adapted from Finance and Commerce)

The cost of converting the property into a hotel was $15 million, including the $3.675 million to acquire the building and $8 million in construction costs, Byhre said. 

The biggest challenges in designing the project were adding bathrooms to the guest rooms and fitting a new elevator into the building. When the Celeste was a convent, residents shared public bathrooms on each floor. To make private bathrooms work, Rebound used the 10 to 12-foot ceilings in the rooms to their advantage, hiding pipes and other bath infrastructure in space they created between floors. The Celeste did have an existing, turn-of-the-century elevator that was preserved for the hotel, but it is too small for efficient guest access. A new, larger elevator shaft was built where the public bathroom spaces were. The renovation also added guest rooms beyond those in the original floor plan. This included several new garden level rooms in the building’s basement and completely redesigned the top floor into suites. (That floor had once been an open outdoor garden space for the nuns and was later enclosed in the 1980s.)  

THE FINISHED PROJECT (adapted from Catholic Spirit and Pioneer Press)