Madison's new Hotel Indigo celebrates the building's history as a paint factory

One of the first things guests see upon entering the new Hotel Indigo on Madison’s rapidly redeveloping East Washington Avenue is a huge Mautz Paint sign that looms over the registration desk. 

For decades, it hung outside the former paint factory at 901 E. Washington Ave. along what was once Madison’s industrial corridor. The sign and other items from the paint company’s past pay tribute to the building’s history and the capital city’s gritty, blue-collar East Side. Other items on display in the lobby and throughout the five-story hotel include brushes, paint cans and rollers, and a quote about colors and shapes from artist Georgia O’Keeffe, a native of Sun Prairie who lived in Madison for a short time. 

The new hotel has 144 rooms, all but 48 of which are in the old brick structure, which was built on the corner of Paterson Street and East Washington in 1915 as a Kleuter & Sons grocery warehouse. The Mautz Paint Company bought it in the 1970s and used the building as its headquarters and manufacturing plant while keeping a retail store on State Street, said Adam Schomaker, vice president of sales and marketing for Great Lakes Management Group, which operates the hotel.

A new brick building was added to the east of the original structure and includes the lobby and the appropriately named Palette Bar and Grill. The eatery focuses on upscale American cuisine with an emphasis on steaks and seafood. It has a patio on East Washington, across the street from the renovated Breese Stevens Field, which is home to Madison’s new professional soccer team, the Flamingos.

The hotel has large murals on each of its floors, including one of Madison native Thornton Wilder, who penned “Our Town,” “The Bridge at San Luis Rey” and earned three Pulitzer Prizes for his works. There’s also a mural of O’Keeffe and one of Carson Gulley, an African American who was the head chef at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1927 to 1954. He also led the Madison branch of the NAACP for many years. Another mural shows Art Mautz testing paint colors.

When I first visited Madison nearly two decades ago and drove west on “East Wash” (as locals call it), the East corridor was rundown, with several used-car lots, empty building sites and structures that had long since lost their tenants. But the city saw untapped potential and began spiffing up the road under former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz as part of the Capitol East District Plan.

The plan called for positioning East Wash as both an employment center and inviting public area, while respecting nearby neighborhoods and keeping views of the Capitol.

Cieslewicz was prescient when in 2010 he said he believed the project “could be one of the biggest economic development engines for the city — an urban place that is cutting edge and vibrant."

Within the past few years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in the area, resulting in the construction of half-a-dozen large apartment and office buildings, several of which are more than 10 stories tall. There is also a new grocery store, the Sylvee music venue, the StartingBlock Innovation Center and additional places to work, live, dine and be entertained. 

“If this hotel would have opened five years ago, it wouldn’t have made sense,” Schomaker said. “But the area is evolving and growing rapidly, with new buildings seemingly sprouting up all the time.”

He said Mautz Paint, which was founded in 1922, was absorbed by Sherwin-Williams in 2001.

In 2004 the Korb family purchased the entire block on which the hotel is located, with their eye on eventually locating a hostelry there. The family, and partner Curt Brink, recently proposed building an 11-story office building just to the east of the Indigo as part of the block’s redevelopment plans. Other projects are in the works. 

In the late 1880s, Schomaker said, much of the land on what is now the East Washington corridor was a marsh. When industries wanted to locate in Madison, the more prosperous west side, where UW-Madison is located, said “no thanks,” he noted, so the marsh was filled, railroad tracks were laid and manufacturers built along the avenue. 

“This area had a lot of hard-working and colorful characters,” Schomaker said. “We wanted to celebrate that history, and we think the design does that. Because the original brick structure is a historic landmark, we had to follow a lot of rules. For example, we couldn’t redo the concrete pillars and we couldn't cover the floors from wall to wall, but we made it all work.”

In the lobby, there is a multi-level display of clear paint cans with various colors, and the ceiling is covered with repurposed wood from a barn outside Duluth, Minn. The lobby also has a pair of games that visitors can play, both made by Wildwoods, a company in Hayward. Behind the games is the O’Keeffe quote in neon. 

The Middleton-based Gary Brink & Associates design group clearly had fun with the project, Schomaker said.  

“There is a playful use of colors throughout the hotel,” he said. “And we tried to adapt and reuse as much as possible.”

He said the Indigo brand, which has more than 60 hotels in the United States, focuses on what makes each of its properties unique. 

“Here in Madison, our tagline is hard-working and colorful,” he said. “That speaks not only to the design aesthetic of the hotel, but also the East Washington neighborhood and its manufacturing history.”

More information: Madison's Hotel Indigo is pet-friendly, with a $75 fee for pets. The hotel is at 901 East Washington Ave., about 80 miles west of Milwaukee. For rates and reservations, see hotelindigo.com.

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