With its dark wood coffered ceilings and its striking Palladian-style French doors, the lobby of the Raphael Hotel is not what you’d expect to find in a Kansas City, Missouri, neighborhood a few miles outside of downtown.

But the hotel originally got its life in 1927 as an apartment building, and its situation-overlooking a tree-lined creek a block from Country Club Plaza, the city’s beautifully laid-out shopping district-is a perfect match for such elegant grandeur. Operated as a hotel since the mid-1970s, this year’s renovation completely updated systems, public spaces, and the 126 guestrooms, while adding dedicated meeting space and a new fitness center.

Chicago’s Gettys handled much of the design work in a warm autumnal palette of gold, russet, and brown hues, in tandem with architects DRL Group and local interior design firm Madden-McFarland Furniture and Design Boutique, which reimagined the restaurant. According to Meg Prendergast, principal at Gettys, the project’s overriding brief was to “carry the flavor of a character-filled and intimate residence throughout the hotel.”

To that end, she says, designers worked with patterns and textures, layering on welcoming hues of sage and terracotta in the lobby, and hand-applying wall finishes. Guestrooms feature bedside botanical prints, pale yellow faux silk grass weave wall coverings, and residential-scale pieces.

Although Country Club Plaza is well-respected for its spot-on re-creation of typical Seville architecture, the designers didn’t feel compelled to echo that influence inside the hotel, according to Prendergast. “It’s reflective of that zone, but there are no direct references,” she says. Yet some of the art and photographs lining the reworked corridors-which are lined in soft mocha vinyl with a small monochromatic pattern and chocolate custom-made carpeting-do feature the architecture of Seville.

“This is a really cool, discoverable little place in a great Midwest town,” Prendergast says.