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The Ivy Hotel

Baltimore, Maryland, United States · Independent · Grand Luxury

The Ivy Hotel: ExteriorThe Ivy Hotel: ExteriorThe Ivy Hotel: Bedroom

In 1889 banker John Gilman commissioned a Mount Vernon mansion at Biddle and North Calvert, and in 2010 philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown acquired it. Five years of restoration later, The Ivy Hotel opened in June 2015, with gas fireplaces, heated bathroom floors, and stocked minibars in the rooms. Michelin gave the house Two Keys in 2025 and again in 2026, and AAA rates it Four Diamond for 2026.

About The Ivy Hotel

History

In 1889, John Gilman — a prosperous Baltimore banker and industrialist — commissioned architect Charles Carson to build him a mansion on the leafy corner of Biddle and North Calvert Streets in Mount Vernon, Baltimore's most socially prestigious neighborhood. Carson was the right choice: he had recently completed the Grand Masonic Temple and the opulent Methodist Church on Mount Vernon Square, both of which spoke the same language of Victorian wealth and civic aspiration that Gilman wanted expressed in his private home. The commission, reportedly worth $40,000, called for inlaid floors, a turreted slate roof, twenty-three individual fireplaces mantled in green marble from local quarries, leaded glass windows, carved wood wainscoting, and a central staircase climbing three stories past stained glass to skylights above. Gilman died before the building was complete, leaving his widow Anne to inhabit the house alone.

The mansion then passed to William Painter — wildly successful inventor, holder of more than a hundred patents, and president of the Crown Cork and Seal Company, which manufactured the modern bottle cap — and his wife Harriet. The Painters brought the house to the height of its social season. After William's death, Harriet built a children's hospital in his name before selling to Dr. Thomas Futcher, a renowned Canadian physician recruited to Johns Hopkins, who maintained a quiet home clinic in one of the ground-floor rooms for years.

The Depression changed the neighborhood's character, and the mansion was gifted to the Baltimore Parks and Recreation Department, where it served unremarkably as office space for decades. Mayor William Schaefer briefly repurposed it in the early 1980s as the Inn at Government House, a residence for visiting dignitaries, but poor management left the building in renewed decline. In 2010 philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown acquired the property, and over five years of intensive restoration — undertaken by Azola Companies and Ziger/Snead Architects — the mansion was returned to something beyond its original grandeur: parquet floors polished back to life, nineteenth-century wallpaper preserved in the Tea Room, the central spiral staircase rebuilt using spindles salvaged from a neighboring structure, and additional square footage added on the Biddle Street side to accommodate a full spa and expanded suites.

The Ivy Hotel opened as a luxury boutique property in June 2015 with twenty-one rooms, each individually decorated and equipped with gas fireplaces, heated bathroom floors, and free minibars. The MICHELIN Guide awarded it Two Keys in 2025, recognizing the rare quality of staying within one of Baltimore's most storied private houses.

The setting

1.5 miles from National Aquarium.

Restaurants and bars

Experiences

Amenities

Awards

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