The four-story hotel was financed by the Douglass House Company, a group of stockholders made up of Houghton businessmen intent on promoting the welfare of Houghton by meeting the demand for decent hotel accommodations in the Copper Country. Ottenheimer designed the building to replace an earlier wooden hotel and Paul P. F. Mueller and Herman Gundlach built it. The hotel of pressed light yellow brick is ornamented with white glazed terra-cotta trim and marks the era's shift from darker sandstone construction. A loggia-embellished facade features twin corner towers with cupolas. When the hotel was converted to apartments for senior citizens in 1984, the barroom on the ground floor was left intact.