AJ Capital Partners announced the launch of Graduate Hotels, with the opening of Graduate Tempe. The new hotel collection will target college markets across America that celebrate each respective town’s local culture and history. Located directly across from Arizona State University, the 141-room boutique hotel will offer an intellectual return to the glory days of college and will feature two food and beverage concepts, The Normal and Tapacubo.

Graduate Tempe is slated to open in late September.

Opening alongside sister hotel Graduate Athens in Georgia, this fall marks the inaugural semester for the novel new hotel brand. Created for travelers who seek memory-making stops, Graduate Hotels are part of a well-curated, thoughtfully crafted collection of hotels that reside in the most unique college towns across the country. Additional locations including Oxford, Miss.; Madison, Wis; Charlottesville, Va.; and Bloomington, In. are slated to open in the next year.

“A hotel is typically your first and last impression of a city, and most hotels give an uninspiring
picture of its surroundings,” says Ben Weprin, Founder of AJ Capital Partners. “Graduate Tempe
certainly sets the stage for the community and captures today’s rhythm of the community.

“Most hotel brands want you to wake up and know what brand you are staying with,” says Christian Strobel, President of Graduate Hotels. “At Graduate we are looking to create an experience where you wake up feeling the vibrancy and energy of the town you are staying in. Our goal is to capture Tempe’s unique spirit throughout the hotel.”

The Normal, the hotel’s diner-chic restaurant, will serve breakfast all-day, along with sandwiches, salads, La Colombe coffee and shakes with signature menu items such as the Minimum Wage Meal and Hayden Mills Blue Corn Pancakes. The Normal will be a nostalgic, warm venue ideal for guests of all ages, especially those with a playful sense of humor.

Tapacubo, the hotel’s Mexican street food outpost, will feature a bar made of 38,000 Mexican
pesos, mid-century garage-inspired furniture and margaritas served from gas pumps. The menu will celebrate south of the border fare items such as tacos, arepas and guacamole along with a beverage menu of Mexican craft beer, margaritas and micheladas. Additionally, there will be rooftop bar on the fourth floor that overlooks the ASU campus.

Graduate Tempe, formerly the Twin Palms Hotel, was designed with passionate travelers in mind and will commemorate the youthful optimism of school days. Inspired by ASU’s groundbreaking work in the study of human origins and life sciences, the hotels’ interiors are decorated with a sense of adventure and will feature an array of primitive and Native American artwork, many sourced locally by the ASU Art Department. Upon arrival, guests will be greeted at the front desk created from a digital print of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, as well as a large-scale ant farm created in partnership with ASU’s School of Life Sciences, Social Insect Research Department.

The Graduate Tempe serves discerning alumni, current and prospective students, parents,
professors, visitors and business travelers alike, providing gracious settings for social events and group meetings. The 1,800-square-feet of flexible meeting space can handle anything from
boardroom meetings and reunions to weddings and events.

For more information about Graduate Hotels, please visit www.graduatehotels.com.