Most maximalist rooms fail for the same reason: everything is turned up and nothing is in charge. Hotel Ulysses in Baltimore is the rare example where nearly every surface is loud and the rooms still hold together, which makes it worth studying for anyone who loves pattern and worries about where it can lead.
The hotel was designed by Ash, the New York firm behind Hotel Peter & Paul in New Orleans, and opened in 2022 inside the Latrobe Building, a nine-story Italian Renaissance Revival building from 1912 in the Mount Vernon neighborhood. It was built as apartments for affluent bachelors and most recently held offices for nonprofits before Ash and the architects at Quinn Evans turned it into a 116-room hotel. The name points in several directions at once: a nineteenth-century ship that carried Bavarian immigrants into Baltimore's harbor, James Joyce's novel, and Odysseus himself.
The guiding reference is John Waters. Will Cooper, Ash's chief creative officer, has said his mind went straight to Hairspray and "Good Morning, Baltimore" when the project began, and the design team imagined a hotel where Waters's characters might check in. They paired that with something far more aristocratic, Visconti's Il Gattopardo, and the tension between the two, camp on one side and faded grandeur on the other, is what keeps the hotel from tipping into theme.
A Four-Color System Holds It Together
The decision that makes Ulysses work is the color system. Every guest room is built around one of four colors, red, yellow, green or blue, a base palette Ash carries across its hotels. Inside that frame, the team layers chintz, leopard and Streamline Moderne details as heavily as it likes, because the room already has a dominant color telling your eye where to rest.
I use the same discipline on residential projects that lean maximal. Pick the dominant color before choosing a single pattern, and make every pattern answer to it. A red room can hold a floral, a stripe and a leopard if all three carry the red. Without that anchor, the same three fabrics fight.
Canopy Beds, Album Quilts and Beaded Shades
The bedrooms are where the references get specific. Each bed is a four-poster with a scalloped canopy, dressed with a modern take on the Baltimore Album quilt, the appliqué quilts made in the city in the 1840s. Lamps wear hand-beaded shades from India, and the furniture mixes vintage pieces with hickory frames upholstered in Ash's own textiles. In the Queen room, the carpet is wall-to-wall leopard.
A scalloped canopy is one of my favorite ways to give a bedroom architecture it doesn't have. It frames the bed, brings the ceiling down over the sleeping area, and gives you a place for a second pattern without touching the walls. The quilt matters just as much. A textile with local history is what keeps a room like this from feeling like a stage set, and it is a habit I'd encourage in any house: one piece that could only have come from where you live.
The Bathrooms Commit
Ash doesn't ease off in the bathrooms. The tile is saturated, and the mirrors are cut in the curve of an Etruscan urn rather than a plain rectangle or oval. That one change of silhouette does as much work as the color. When a client wants a bold powder room but is nervous about pattern, I often suggest starting the same way, with a shaped mirror and a single strong tile color, before adding wallpaper.
Ash Bar and Bloom's
Downstairs, the public rooms carry the same story at a larger scale. Ash Bar, the all-day café that becomes a cocktail bar at night, is paneled in burl wood and takes its cues from steam train dining cars and 1930s ocean liners. Bloom's, the lobby-level cocktail bar named for Leopold Bloom of Joyce's novel, looks to 1920s Art Deco and pours a list that runs from Prohibition to the 1970s, and a separate mirrored late-night lounge leans into early disco. Running through all of it, easy to miss on a first visit, is a flamingo motif, a quiet nod to Waters and Pink Flamingos.
How to Borrow From Ulysses at Home
None of this needs a hotel budget. Start with one dominant color per room. Give the bed or the sofa a silhouette, a scalloped canopy or a skirted base, so pattern has a frame to sit in. Choose one textile with local history. Then add a single animal print, used at a large scale and low in the room, where it reads as a neutral rather than a statement.
A leopard on the floor does what the carpet in the Queen room does: it gives a busy room common ground. That is the role the Panthera spotted leopard rug plays in the rooms I design, and paired with ruffled pillow covers on the bed and pleated lamp shades on the nightstands, it gives you the softer half of the Ulysses formula.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who designed Hotel Ulysses in Baltimore?
The interiors are by Ash, the New York design and hospitality firm, with architecture by Quinn Evans.
What building is Hotel Ulysses in?
The Latrobe Building, a nine-story Italian Renaissance Revival building completed in 1912 at 2 East Read Street in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood. It was originally built as apartments for bachelors.
How do you make a maximalist room feel intentional?
Choose one dominant color for the room and make every pattern carry it, vary the scale of the patterns, and give large pieces like beds and sofas a strong silhouette so the pattern has a frame.
