Hotel Pattee, Perry, Iowa 

A suave young man in a uniform holds the door, inviting visitors to step from rural Iowa into a secret, plush utopia.

Inside the two sets of ornate double doors, a visitor may choose to relax by the roaring double-hearth fireplace or take time for brunch at David’s Milwaukee Diner. A little wandering leads to high-ceilinged ballrooms, elegant meeting chambers and even a fully furnished library. Visitors who choose to explore the basement will discover a bowling alley, a recreational center and a spa.

The experience will not be complete, however, until those visitors have checked into one of the 40 themed rooms on the upper floors of this establishment.
Welcome to the Hotel Pattee.

“It’s an unusual hotel,” said Phil Stone, a resident of Perry, Iowa, the hometown of the Hotel Pattee. “As you travel around the state of Iowa and you say you’re from Perry, people say, ‘Oh, the hotel.’”

Stone and his wife, Cathy, are frequent guests to David’s Milwaukee Diner on the Hotel Pattee’s main floor.

“It’s a really classy place,” Cathy Stone said.

After filling their bellies, guests may choose to retire to the library, with themed books and videos available for their use.

Howard Kaler, general manager of the Hotel Pattee, said the owner, Roberta Green Ahmanson, chose every item individually to fit the theme of the hotel.

The fact that the Hotel Pattee has its own library reflects an intellectual theme. It is not surprising, then, that Stone also said the Hotel Pattee draws a lot of businesspeople.

“There’s a foundry in town owned by a Canadian company,” he said with a knowing grin. “They have their board of directors meetings here, not [in Canada].”

Perry residents’ lives are so entwined with the Hotel Pattee that most know its history, as Stone quickly demonstrated.

Stone said a man named David Jackson Pattee opened a little general store up the river. When the railroad came through in 1869, Pattee moved his general store to Perry. From then on, he was integral to the development of the little town.

Kaler added that Pattee had two sons who built the hotel in his honor. Pattee did not live to see the hotel open in 1913, but the legacy has lived on for nearly 100 years.

Over the next few decades, the hotel changed hands several times until former Perry residents Howard F. and Roberta Green Ahmanson bought it in October 1993. Two years later, they closed the hotel for the first time since its opening.

The Ahmansons wanted to add a flair of local history to their hotel, and during the time it was closed, they completed some serious restorations. The Hotel Pattee reopened for business in May 1997.

“We’re a 40-room hotel, and all the rooms are themed after people who have settled or are settling in this area,” Kaler said.

Kaler, who is from upstate New York, said he thought the Hotel Pattee was worth a move halfway across the country.

“I met the Ahmansons years ago,” he said. “When the job opened up [in 1999], they asked me to interview. When I saw the place, I fell in love with it.”

The Hotel Pattee charms visitors with beautiful wall paintings, vases and ceramics. This ambience even extends to the view from the hotel because the nearby rooftops display original sculptures for guests to peruse.

“All art throughout the hotel is original,” Kaler said. “There are no reprints, so we have a museum-quality art collection.”

The hotel often hosts symposiums and conferences featuring famous artists. The fine arts permeate every aspect of the hotel.  

“We even have artwork in the bathrooms,” Kaler said, gesturing to a large picture hanging over a whirlpool bathtub in one spa-like bathroom.

Kaler showed off several of the hotel’s many rooms and facilities with pride, leading the way through a maze of lavishly carpeted hallways. He said each room is individually designed to convey one theme, and the owners chose painters and decorators for each room based on their expertise in that particular style.

Those styles vary widely, but they stay with the common theme of honoring immigrants to the area. One example of these themed rooms is the Mexican Room, which is dominated by the ornate carved headboards on the two queen-sized beds. Mexican patterns adorn comforters, chairs and lamps. Every detail of each room is specifically crafted to convey the theme.

Some rooms are not necessarily related to the ethnicity of immigrants but rather to some part of their culture. The Quilt Room, as its name suggests, is quilted from ceiling to floor.

“Many of these are Iowa State Fair winners,” Kaler said, acknowledging the room's quilted bedspread, wall hangings and the quilted design on the chairs and desk.

Somewhere else in the extravagant labyrinth of the Hotel Pattee is the Italian Room, where soft lighting illuminates wooden crownwork, a window seat and a full wall of what Kaler calls “built-ins.”

This name refers to furniture, such as a dresser, that is built directly into the wall and individually styled to fit the room. Mass-produced stand-alone dressers have no place at the Hotel Pattee.

In fact, the entire hotel is crafted in the English Arts and Crafts style. This design technique, popular in the late 19th century, features simple and unique elements of individual craftsmanship.

To ensure that guests get the full effect, each room has a plaque inside the door explaining the history of the room’s style and what inspired it. Even the meeting rooms exhibit unique personality.

Kaler explained the name behind one such space, the Canisteo Room.

Stepping inside the door, guests first see a set of large paintings, each mounted in its own frame but looking window-like onto a single landscape of soft green fields and cloudy blue sky. Next, visitors notice a plaque by the door, which explains that the room takes its name from a type of soil that makes Iowa farmland so fertile.

“[Iowa State University] came and cored the soil and pulled it out,” Kaler said, gesturing to a core sample mounted on the wall.

Heading downstairs from the Canisteo Room on the ground floor, guests have several dreamlike surprises awaiting them.

First is the two-lane bowling alley, which Kaler said was a duckpin bowling alley in the original hotel. Today, the hotel boasts two full lanes and an electronic scoring system.

“That way you can’t cheat,” he explained, smiling.

Farther down the hallway, visitors enter separate men’s and women’s dressing rooms, complete with a room for massages. The dressing rooms lead to the in-house spa, an underground tropical paradise. A hot tub occupies the middle of the room, and a glass wall and sparkling white surfaces provide elegance to the little room. The two saunas are the icing on the cake.

Some guests remember their visit to the Hotel Pattee with a souvenir or two. Instead of making off with one of the terrycloth robes provided in each room, guests can head back downstairs where, not surprisingly, the hotel has its own gift shop.

“[The gift shop] used to be a pharmacy owned by [local businessman] R.B. Smith from 1919 to 1951,” gift shop manager Angella Miller said. “It’s been restored.”

Miller quickly pointed at a mural covering the gift shop’s back wall far above customers’ heads. The painting depicts the pharmacy as it looked in 1919.

Exiting the gift shop, guests will find themselves near a door that leads into the Sumas Courtyard. The courtyard actually is an alley that has been transformed into a picturesque venue for lunch or relaxation. Several circular tables fill the small area, which looks out onto the street through an artistic metal archway. Artwork adorns the sides of the buildings that make up the alleyway, and ivy covers every surface that artwork does not. Although the courtyard is a little chilly in the winter, the lobby is more than adequate for guests looking to spend some time relaxing and enjoying the atmosphere.

As Kaler strode through the lobby, a guest seated in one of the plush chairs near the fireplace pulled him aside.

“Everything is amazing,” she said, beaming.

Photos by Ashley Richards