May 14, 2026

Bend's historic post office becomes boutique hotel

Photos via The Westman hotel’s Instagram [enlarge]

The Westman hotel in Bend benefits from traditional 1930s federal design: substantial and Art Deco.

Minnie Westman was the first woman mail carrier west of the Mississippi, riding horseback in the 1880s to deliver the mail in Oregon. Her name lives on in a new boutique hotel in downtown Bend, Oregon.

The Westman now occupies the old United State Post Office at 777 N.W. Wall St., with 23 guest suites, an outdoor heated soaking pool and a lobby bar called Minnie's.

The adaptive reuse design of the post office into a hotel endeavored to preserve not only the Art Deco ambiance, but also to reduce the renovation's environmental footprint by retaining as much of the original structure as possible. Included in the retained infrastructure are 175,000 bricks, 1,900 square feet of terrazzo flooring, 1,000 tons of concrete and 44 original windows.

Guest rooms leverage historic architectural elements, some with 16-foot ceilings, 10-foot-by-5-foot windows, private outdoor patios with fire pits and 700-square-foot mezzanine suites.

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Designers preserved many features listed on the historic register, such as the terrazzo floors.

The 1932 building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The original architect was James A. Wetmore, the Treasury Department's supervising architect. According to the nomination, the builder was Charles Weitz & Sons Inc. out of Des Moines, Iowa, selected with its low bid of $97,386.

The building was the earliest example of reinforced concrete in Bend, according to the nomination. The nomination further explains how the construction was not only unusual but was considered luxurious by the locals at the time. The design elements on the eastern facade are ornamental and were typical of federal buildings of the 1930s, intending to evoke a sense of stability and authority. The entablature on the eastern facade holds the building's name in gold leaf on terra-cotta.

The project team includes Embarcadero Hospitality Group, Emerick Architects, LRS Architects, R&H Construction, Schuster Constructive Solutions LLC, Wallop and ZoePDX.