Martin H.
Yelp
You can't beat the location at the price. That said, this hostel - not hotel/B&B - leaves much to be desired.
The first thing I should note is how hot it was in the summer We are graduate students and were in Seattle for a conference admittedly during a heat wave (85-90 degree highs), which is unusual for Seattle. The old building has only a ceiling fan to cool the rooms, which made it extremely difficult to get to sleep at night and stay asleep. It may have been easier to get to sleep if we could keep the windows open, but the tremendous amount of noise outside made us want to keep the windows closed. I would strongly suggest not staying here if the weather will be hot during your visit.
The shared bathroom situation was okay. If you're under 30, or enjoy reliving the experience of a dormitory, then you can handle the shared (sex-segregated) bathrooms. Still, each bathroom has only one stall and two showers for an entire floor, which was a bit tight, especially when everyone wants to use it in the morning. And while I saw cleaning staff in the bathrooms each day, flies were a problem due to lack of screens.
We had to change rooms three times over our stay, so we got to see how unstandardized the rooms are. I'm not speaking about the charming variation you'd expect in a 100+ year old building. I mean that our first room had no working surface (i.e. desk) but had a robe so you didn't have to walk naked down the hall to the bathrooms, but the second room had a desk (which was broken) but no robe. Our third third room was good - it had both a robe and a stable desk - but the towel meant for showering was a hand towel, so I had to pilfer a proper one from the housekeeping cart. All that said, I was happy to find no evidence of bed bugs in any of the mattresses, which had been a problem in Seattle for a while.
The whole outfit felt rather haphazard and disorganized. The people in charge of check-in and other services were all college students, who, bless them, didn't really know what they were doing. It would have been nice to have an 'real' adult whose career was hospitality to turn to with questions/complaints (like, for example, when we discovered the apple juice that had been served on several mornings for breakfast had fermented). This building does not have a front desk where you can just go see the manager; the manager, another student, when present, is closed up in a room on the top floor, which doesn't exactly scream 'come to me for help' like a front desk would.
The most obnoxious thing for me was the fact that the information booklets in the rooms are not up to date. For example, the password for the weak and inconsistent wi-fi printed in the information booklet did not match up to the one found on our key fob, and, one Sunday, we decided to sleep in and get breakfast at 9:30 only to find the breakfast had been cleared away before we got there (the booklet -- and the laminated sheet in the breakfast area itself -- said breakfast until 10 on the weekends). This screwed up our schedule for the day and cost us more money.
Staying at the College Inn might have been fine, perhaps even charming, for a short stay, but the inconsistencies, lack of amenities, and poor organization of the business as a whole made us more than ready to leave this place behind after our 11 night visit.