T

he Ace Hotel Seattle's standard rooms have shared bathrooms. Let us be absolutely clear about this. Fully half of the rooms do not have their own private bathrooms. We trust some of you, at least, are still with us — the Ace Hotel, obviously, will appeal to a slightly different segment of the marketplace than, say, the Sorrento. This place drips with an unforced, unpretentious cool; the lobby, with its dark walnut floors and retro-futuristic white walls (more Barbarella than Balazs) looks more like an art gallery than a hotel lobby, and the guest rooms—with their 14-foot ceilings and walls of whitewashed brick—look more like a gallery than most galleries.

At the risk of buying too credulously into a regional stereotype — this is the Pacific Northwest, not Hollywood. In Seattle, where tech mavens with stock portfolios wear thermal T's from Army Surplus, cool means spending wisely, and marking these rooms up to design-mag prices would only detract from the cachet of this no-frills sleepover club. Here you may sleep under the watchful eye of Shepard Fairey's Andre the Giant, with a view of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains, or just the streets of Belltown. Those shared bathrooms are sparkling clean, not at all the dormitory nightmare one may imagine, though if you must have a private bathroom, it's worth cracking open your wallet and shelling out the extra fifty-odd dollars. A Batman-esque hidden revolving door opens into a charmingly minimal space, decked out in (what else) walnut and white, with an industrial aluminum sink and no Philippe Starck anything.

Services and amenities are minimal, of course — cable TV is about as plush as it gets. If you have read this far, you know luxury isn't the point; this is a place to lay one's head, a home base for adventures around town (with wireless internet access, though — these people aren't savages, after all). Your fellow travelers will likely be up to all hours, so this might not be the place for early-to-bed types, or the severely jetlagged. Downstairs is the new home of the Cyclops Café, a local favorite (every hotel says its bar is a local favorite, but trust us on this one), and beyond are the bars and cafés of Belltown, as well as the traditional Seattle destinations like Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market. Perhaps that's the true significance of the white walls: to shame idle guests into getting out there and doing some living.