By Dathan Kazsuk
For more than half a century, Raleigh’s round hotel has been almost impossible to ignore.
Some called it the Hair Curler. Former employees called it something else: the Beer Can. For eight years after it opened in 1969, the cylindrical building was Raleigh’s tallest. Later came different hotel names, top-floor dinners, piano nights, visiting musicians, and generations of stories.
Then it almost disappeared.
Plans announced in 2022 called for demolishing the building at 320 Hillsborough Street and replacing it with a new 20-story mixed-use development. Instead, the story took a sharp turn. The old Holiday Inn survived, earned Raleigh Historic Landmark designation in 2025, and has now reopened as Hotel Indigo Raleigh.
The transformation was substantial: $36 million, 204 guest rooms, a completely reworked ground floor and a new top-floor restaurant and cocktail lounge overlooking downtown. The building’s familiar circular form, however, remains.
You don’t necessarily need a reason to visit Raleigh. You might just need five reasons to spend the night.
Plenty of new hotels try to manufacture a story. Hotel Indigo Raleigh already has one.
The building dates to 1969 and was one of a small collection of round hotels conceived during Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson’s expansion of the brand. By 2022, however, its days appeared numbered. Owner Tidal Real Estate Partners announced plans to raze the building and replace it with a tower containing a luxury hotel, apartments, and restaurant space.
Those plans never happened.
Instead, the circular tower received Raleigh Historic Landmark designation in December 2025 and became the centerpiece of an adaptive-reuse project rather than rubble.
That’s part of what makes spending a night here different from checking into another newly constructed downtown hotel. The outside is still unmistakably the round hotel Raleigh remembers. The experience inside is something else entirely.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to stay here doesn’t involve the guest room.
Take the elevator to the 20th floor.
High Ground Lounge, the hotel’s new bar and restaurant, pairs panoramic views of Raleigh with contemporary Southern food, craft cocktails and a curated beverage program. For longtime Raleigh residents, going to the top of this building for dinner or drinks isn’t new.
Cindy Trowbridge remembers it well.
Trowbridge was in her early 20s and fresh out of college when she took a part-time serving job there in 1974. Staff had their own name for the circular building.
They called it “the Beer Can.”
“The view from the top floor was the best in Raleigh,” she remembers.
Dining out looked a little different then. Guests dressed for dinner. Trowbridge remembers the tips being good and the bar filling on nights when a pianist played.
And among the people she served? Doc Watson.
Five decades later, drinks above Raleigh are part of the attraction again.
New York-based INC Architecture & Design developed interiors inspired by the curved building, layering sculptural forms and geometric patterns with bold colors, polished chrome, and custom built-in furnishings.
INC arrives in Raleigh with a portfolio that includes interiors for 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, work at the restored TWA Hotel, the reimagining of Rockefeller Center’s concourse public spaces, and upcoming projects including the Atlas Hotel at Harvard and Kimpton Era at Rockefeller Center.
That background makes sense here. This wasn’t a blank-box hotel where designers could start with four straight walls. The circular form dictates the experience.
Architecture firm ESa, which led the building renovation, also stripped away a collection of smaller spaces on the ground floor to create a larger, brighter community lounge. A vintage Airstream now serves as a courtyard coffee bar connecting the arrival and check-in areas. The hotel also offers flexible meeting and event space and a 1,500-square-foot fitness center equipped with TechnoGym equipment.
The ground-floor lounge and Airstream coffee bar were designed not only for travelers but also for downtown workers and Raleigh residents. General Manager Carlos Faz says the goal is for the hotel to operate as a community gathering place—somewhere locals might stop for coffee, head upstairs for dinner and drinks, or use the spaces for celebrations.
The art helps. A collection curated by nineDOTarts incorporates work from North Carolina artists throughout the property. Among the artists represented on the ground floor is Caitlin Cary, whose Raleigh credentials stretch across two creative worlds.
Music fans may know Cary as a co-founder, fiddler, and vocalist in Raleigh alt-country band Whiskeytown, as well as a member of Tres Chicas and a solo artist.
Cary creates sewn fabric collages she calls Needleprints, using repurposed fabric to document the buildings, businesses, and landmarks that help communities remember themselves. Much of her work has focused specifically on Raleigh and North Carolina.
You couldn’t come up with a much better full-circle moment for a hotel built like one.
A historic display can only fit so much.
Ask people who worked here or stayed here, though, and the stories start coming quickly.
Marti Brown was 16 in 1976 when she and some friends traveled to Raleigh for what she remembers as their first big concert: the Commodores, then fronted by Lionel Richie.
Of course they stayed at the round hotel. At one point, the elevator stopped, and several men stepped inside.
“No one was looking up or talking,” Brown remembers.
When she and her friends got off at the next floor, Brown glanced back.
Richie started singing “Just to Be Close to You.”
“I about died,” she says.
The teenagers told the band they were attending the concert. Brown remembers being invited to a meet-and-greet afterward in the lounge at the top of the Holiday Inn.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s.
Richard Averitte was working as the hotel’s catering manager when the Allman Brothers Band was staying there.
Late one evening, Gregg Allman came through the lobby and invited Averitte to have a drink.
Only one problem: the hotel bar was already closed.
Averitte drove to a nearby gas station, bought a six-pack, and came back.
Allman was gone.
Averitte didn’t know his room number.
More than 30 years later, the missed opportunity still bothers him.
Some people regret the things they did in their 20s and 30s.
Averitte regrets the beer he never got to drink with Gregg Allman.
Elizabeth Snyder’s memory goes back even earlier.
Her Beta Club group from East Bladen High School stayed at the hotel in 1972 while attending the Beta Club Convention in Raleigh.
They were having the kind of trip high school students remember.
Then an elevator door opened. Out stepped members of the Alice Cooper band, in full costume and makeup, headed out to perform.
Try topping that at the continental breakfast.
And then there is the story that almost sounds invented.
On March 15, 1980, a young Prince performed at Dorton Arena while touring with Rick James.
Sometime after midnight, he wound up at the Holiday Inn Raleigh Downtown, where N.C. State’s Sigma Pi fraternity was holding its spring formal in the Capital Ballroom.
Prince and his band crashed the party and played using the hired band’s instruments. The exact set list has apparently been lost to history, but Prince historians list the impromptu performance on March 16, 1980, with roughly 100 people in attendance.
Think about that for a moment. Plenty of new hotels can hang music-themed artwork on a wall. Not many can say Prince jammed with them.
Once the doors open, its location will make it an easy stop before a Bulls game or DPAC performance. Its greater test, however, will be whether Durham adopts it as something more ordinary and more important—a place to meet, linger, and return to even when nothing else is happening downtown.
From the baseball gloves on the wall to the hidden patio beneath the smokestack, it looks as though Fullsteam has built this new chapter with exactly that goal in mind.
For more bites, pours, pairings, and local food-and-drink finds, visit our Sip & Savor page.
Hotel Indigo Raleigh isn’t trying to erase what happened at 320 Hillsborough Street.
That’s what makes the renovation interesting.
The 204-room hotel is now owned by Tidal Real Estate Partners and managed by Sage Hospitality Group. For locals, the larger attraction may have little to do with the brand flag outside.
It’s the opportunity to step back inside a building many Raleigh residents thought they had already lost.
Have coffee beside an Airstream. Find Caitlin Cary’s artwork. Take the elevator upstairs. Order a drink with Raleigh spread out below.
And maybe wonder what other stories those curved walls haven’t told yet.
Maybe you’re story will be next.
