The Collegiate Hotel

The Collegiate Hotel occupies a building with a longer history than most hotels in Auburn can claim. It started life in the 1940s as Wittel Hall, a dormitory on the edge of the Auburn University campus, and for decades it housed students rather than overnight guests. In 2017, Auburn graduates Brian Wirth (class of 1995) and Kim Wirth (class of 1996) bought the property and spent the years that followed converting the old dorm into a forty room boutique hotel. The Wirths describe the project in personal terms: it took them four years to graduate from Auburn and the next twenty five trying to find a way back, and buying Wittel Hall was how they finally did it. Today the hotel bills itself, without much argument from anyone else in town, as downtown Auburn’s only independently owned boutique hotel.

The building sits at 205 South Gay Street, close enough to campus and to Jordan-Hare Stadium that guests can walk to a game rather than drive. That location, and the crowd it draws on fall Saturdays, shapes a lot of what the hotel offers. There is a golf cart shuttle for getting around downtown and campus without dealing with game day traffic, and every guest room comes with one complimentary parking space, a detail that matters in a town where parking disappears fast on a football weekend. Guests who need something after the front desk would otherwise be unstaffed can text or call the hotel directly, a system the staff refers to informally as reaching “IVY,” and get a response any time of day.

Inside, the forty rooms carry the building’s dormitory history lightly rather than hiding it. Original local artwork hangs throughout the property, and each room has its own distinct look rather than a single repeated template, a common trait among independent boutique properties but a genuine point of difference from the chain hotels clustered along Auburn’s commercial corridors. Rooms come stocked with luxury spa and bath toiletries, and check-in runs from 3:00 p.m. with checkout at 11:00 a.m., standard hours that still leave room for early or late arrangements when the front desk can accommodate them.

The hotel’s two bars give it a social life beyond overnight stays. A lobby bar anchors the ground floor, and a rooftop bar looks out over Samford Hall and the rest of downtown Auburn, a view that draws hotel guests and locals alike, especially in the hours before and after a home game. A wraparound porch, decorated with a mural, gives guests another place to sit outside without leaving the property. The hotel also books event space for weddings and corporate functions, which puts it in regular use outside of football season, when Auburn’s tourism traffic is lighter but the university itself keeps generating visitors for graduations, camps, and conferences.

Because it sits so close to campus, The Collegiate Hotel markets itself heavily around Auburn University’s calendar, particularly football weekends, when Jordan-Hare Stadium pulls tens of thousands of visitors into a town that would otherwise be a fraction of the size. Pricing on game weekends climbs well above a typical weeknight rate, in keeping with every hotel in Auburn during those stretches, but the hotel’s downtown location means guests can walk to the stadium instead of dealing with the shuttle buses and parking lots that visitors staying out on the highway have to contend with. Outside of football season, the hotel still draws a steady mix of prospective students and their families touring campus, visiting faculty and speakers, and travelers who simply want a downtown Auburn stay with more character than a standard interstate hotel room.

The Wirths’ ownership is central to how the hotel presents itself, and it shows up in small ways beyond the marketing copy: a hotel built around one couple’s specific, decades long relationship with Auburn University reads differently than a franchise property built from a corporate template. For anyone weighing where to stay near campus, from a Saturday game trip to a parents’ weekend visit, The Collegiate Hotel is the rare downtown option that is not part of a national hotel brand, occupying a building with real history in a town where most of the newer hotel construction belongs to chains.