This Historic Asheville Hotel Offers Unmatched Blue Ridge Mountain Views And 2025's Best New Restaurant

While Asheville, North Carolina, might be most well known for the Biltmore Estate, "America's Largest Home," it's also a small city replete with other historic buildings, a few of them hotels. Examples include the Omni Grove Park Inn, which opened in 1913, and the former Battery Park Hotel, built in 1924 (now senior apartments). Another is the Flatiron Building, built by Albert C. Wirth, completed nearly a century ago in 1926.

Modeled after New York City's famous Flatiron Building (and built between the aptly named Wall Street and Battery Park Avenue), Asheville's rendition, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979, originally housed office space and the city's first radio station. However, during the decades that followed Asheville's largest bank collapse in 1930, much of downtown was abandoned, frozen in time while the city's debts were being paid. Asheville began a new era of growth with a renewed interest in revitalization in the last 20 years, and one of the restoration projects was the Flatiron Building. 

In 2024, the building reopened as the Flat Iron Hotel. Named one of Travel + Leisure's 100 Best New Hotels of the Year, this iconic Art Deco-style stunner offers guests a step back in time to Asheville's Roaring Twenties, coupled with modern amenities, fine dining, and a breath of fresh mountain air. With astounding views of the surrounding Blue Ridge mountains from the rooftop bar, and its unique food and drink venues — including Luminosa, named one of Southern Living's 20 Best New Restaurants In The South — plus a co-working and event space called Iron Works, the Flat Iron Hotel should be on your must-stay (and must-dine) list.

Getting to Asheville, one of America's top three towns to visit, is easy. Asheville Regional Airport has nonstop flights from around two dozen U.S. destinations, as well as a spiffy new concourse. Named this year's most affordable fall foliage spot in the US, there's no better time than now to visit Asheville.

The Flat Iron Hotel describes itself as "a stay with a story". Throughout the hotel, you'll notice relics from the past, like an old Steinway piano, a letterbox, and other mementos of days (and former tenants) gone by, an exhibit named "Flat Iron Folks". The hotel's 71 guest rooms each have an era-appropriate name: the Gatsby Queen, Adventurer, Wolfe King, Earhart Double Queen, Double Bunk, Zelta Queen Suite, and Ellington King Suite. All are equipped with today's technology, like complimentary Wi-Fi and smart TVs, specially curated Bellino linens and towels, organic Allegrini Hemp Code toiletries, coffee, tea, and water.

You'll definitely want to head to the rooftop for coffee and a casual breakfast in the morning and drinks and "sky bites" (small plates) in the evening, to take in the expansive and wondrous views of western North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains and French Broad River Valley. For the ultimate dining experience, the hotel's famed Luminosa restaurant is just the ticket. The culinary team of Executive Chef Graham House and Chef de Cuisine Sean McMullen serves "rustic Italian with mountain soul": house-made appetizers, pastas, pizzas, classic main courses, and desserts. All are made using locally sourced ingredients and paired with local beers, cocktails, and Italian and American wines. Wet your whistle at the end of the day at the hotel's take on a speakeasy, Red Ribbon Society, a former boiler room turned craft cocktail bar.