08-05-2025
This Boston hotel has been named one of the 10 best in the country. (And it happens to be one of our favorites.)
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The hotel opened in 2016, and
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My most recent stay was last winter, and I liked it even more. The hotel now has free snacks in guest rooms. That means I wasn't paying $8 for potato chips. The best way to describe the guest rooms at the Godfrey is well-tailored and crisp. They're midcentury preppy, if such a thing exists. It's like visiting a cultured uncle's pied-à-terre in Harvard Square.
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Just off the main lobby of the Godfrey Hotel is an elegant marble staircase.
Godfrey Hotel
I suspect that TripAdvisor readers weren't thinking about the hotel's architecture when leaving their reviews (I couldn't find any mention of it when I skimmed through), but the Gothic Revival building that the Godfrey occupies was designed by famed architect Arthur Bowditch. It's actually two buildings, designed by Bowditch in 1904 and 1906, that were combined when Downtown Crossing fell upon hard times. As a result, the rooms at the Godfrey are all unique.
While the Godfrey isn't prohibitively expensive, it is not basic. This hotel uses Frette sheets and has a 55-inch television in each room. I've scored rooms as low as $150 a night during the winter. This time of year, every room in the city is expensive, and the Godfrey is averaging $400 a night or more. I've slept around this city a lot — in hotels, of course — and I think the Godfrey is fairly priced.
The TripAdvisor ranking is good news for the hotel, but I confess that it also made me feel good. Here was my validation that a hotel can be memorable without offering a custom-scented shampoo or obsessing over its Instagram account.
Christopher Muther can be reached at
