The Hay-Adams Hotel is a 1928 Italian Renaissance monument, one whose privacy and discretion are near-legendary, and whose location, with the White House and the National Mall as a backdrop, is one-of-a-kind. Constant attention has kept it looking as opulent as can be, while constant technological improvements mean that, beneath its old-world elegance, the Hay-Adams is a thoroughly modern luxury hotel.

It’s not every day a 19th-century Romanesque Revival bank building in Washington’s Penn Quarter district reopens as a hotel, especially one as stylish as Riggs. It starts with the well-preserved bones of the stately old bank, but this is no mere restoration — they’ve taken liberties, using the city’s history as their inspiration, and the result adds a note of playfulness to the elegance you expect from a Washington D.C. luxury hotel.

Physically, it’s not all that far from Capitol Hill, but in terms of its aesthetics and its atmosphere, it presents a completely different side of the nation’s capital. The views of the Potomac are some of the city’s finest. The interiors are decorated in a modernist style that’s visibly Parisian-influenced, in keeping with the local custom, and the rooms and suites are both stylish and luxurious, most of them facing the river, all of them equally well suited to business and to leisure.

The Jefferson combines old-world aesthetics with boutique-era services, amenities, and personality. The rooms are classic in design, but modern in function, with iPads in every room and suite and charging stations in the desks. Premier and Deluxe rooms are lavish, and the First Lady and Presidential suites are positively opulent — the latter featuring no fewer than five balconies with extraordinary views of the city and its monuments.

In a town as traditional as Washington, a little bit of modern design goes a long way. The newly redesigned Dupont Hotel is, in its subtly stylish way, one of the hippest hotels in the nation’s capital. It’s the only hotel on Dupont Circle, in a neighborhood better known for dining, nightlife and entertainment than for monuments or institutions — which, provided you’re not here with your high school history class, is definitely a good thing.

For an experience that’s smaller in scale than the typical luxury brands, but similarly high in standards, there’s another option in town: Rosewood Washington D.C., on the banks of the C&O Canal, whose 55 rooms, 12 suites, and eight townhouses show the influence of modern boutique-hotel hospitality, adapted for a luxury-hotel clientele. It’s housed in a relatively understated brick building that barely hints at what’s inside.

This isn’t just the hippest hotel in Washington, but one of the most impressive, newer boutique hotels in America, and it’s thanks in large part to the fact that its founder, Katharine Lo, isn’t given to half-measures. The basics of high-end hospitality are second nature. What makes the Eaton special is everything else, from its unapologetically bohemian interiors to its even more unapologetically outspoken social-justice ethos — a rarity for D.C.