Forty years on Richmond Road.
From colonial-style conference hotel to William & Mary residence hall — the documented story.
The Williamsburg Hospitality House opened on Richmond Road in the early 1970s — contemporary accounts commonly cite 1972, while a William & Mary campus-history archive notes the building under construction in 1973. Its brick exterior was built to sit comfortably opposite the College of William & Mary, whose Zable Stadium and Alumni House face the site across Richmond Road.
For four decades it operated as an independent, colonial-style hotel and conference center — by its own description, “an independent luxury hotel within walking distance to the historic area of Colonial Williamsburg and across the street from The College of William and Mary.” In its later years it was operated by Texas-based 1859 Historic Hotels, alongside properties like San Antonio’s Menger and Crockett hotels.
The hotel at its peak
The hotel’s own website in 2006 counted 296 guest rooms, including 11 suites, 3 junior suites and 3 demi-suites, two full-service restaurants, a gift shop, outdoor pool, workout facility and complimentary underground parking. Meeting facilities hosted groups of up to 400, and by the time of the 2013 sale William & Mary counted roughly 20,000 square feet of conference space and 318 rooms on 3.6 acres.
The William & Mary purchase
On March 22, 2013, W&M President Taylor Reveley announced the university would buy the Hospitality House — rooms, restaurants, meeting space and a 308-space parking garage — to ease a chronic student-housing waitlist. The purchase was financed with 20-year Commonwealth of Virginia bonds, repaid from housing fees.
The hotel served its final guests through Commencement weekend, May 2013. On April 19, 2013 the Board of Visitors renamed the building One Tribe Place, and that fall the first William & Mary students moved in. The building still stands — no longer a hotel, but still full of guests.
The building today
The brick building at 415 Richmond Road still stands as One Tribe Place, a William & Mary residence hall — the same architecture, now housing students instead of travellers. This archive keeps the hotel years from fading: what the Hospitality House offered, how it described itself (this site even borrows the sage-and-brick palette of the hotel’s own 2005 pages), and how its story ended.