The Best Hotel in Michigan Sends Its Profits to Charity
Saint John's Resort was once a Catholic seminary, but now it's a cloistered oasis for travelers
Plymouth — Saint John’s Resort is no ordinary hotel. Housed in an ornate former Catholic seminary, it’s been consistently rated as one of the best hotels in Michigan the last few years. It even eclipsed Mackinac Island’s famous Grand Hotel, taking the number one spot for U.S. News and World Report’s 2025 Michigan hotel rankings.
Even more impressive? Saint John’s is run entirely for charity, with all net profits distributed out to humanitarian initiatives as part of the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation.
You can tell Saint John’s is a special place, and totally anomalous in the Plymouth area. Plymouth is otherwise characterized by McMansion housing developments and the sort of bougie strip malls, shops, and restaurants you see in well-off suburban areas.
Saint John’s was a Catholic seminary for training priests in the Archdiocese of Detroit, up until the late 1980s. The architecture, vibes, and overall aura of the campus befits a former bastion of Catholicism. Even in its now laicized form, the lingering imprint of spirituality remains.
Perhaps it’s simply the architecture. The brickwork, carvings, and statuary on the buildings. The tiled floors, stone walls, chandeliers, coffered ceilings, and bas-reliefs. The brick bell tower overlooking the campus, every building topped by Spanish Mission-style terracotta roofs.
It all feels much older than it actually is. Saint John’s wasn’t built until the late 1940s, recent for Catholic architecture. Yet it was built with this blend of heritage Catholic architectural styles, with great attention to detail and quality of materials.
The chapel at the center of the campus is stunning, with ornate gold leafed frescoes, marble floors, carved stone statuary, and a full-size pipe organ behind the altar. It’s still a functional Catholic chapel, consecrated and operated by the Archdiocese of Detroit, available for Catholic weddings and ceremonies.
Saint John’s is clearly set up for hosting weddings, primarily. The spaces are fancy and opulent, and more likely than not, very expensive. The resort boasts four separate ballrooms, an atrium, and a garden pavilion. Even the smallest one, the 150-person mosaic ballroom, is grandiose.
The more recent addition to Saint John’s is the Cardinal, a championship level 18-hole golf course right on the grounds. Opened just a few years ago, the course played host last summer to LIV Golf’s team championship round, drawing in a crowd of thousands for the event.
The event clearly went well, as LIV is currently set to repeat the event at Saint John’s again this summer. It really is an ideal venue for it, with a beautiful course, hotel on site, and enough event space to host all the staff and facilities needed for a golf tournament of that scale.
Now, let’s talk about the hotel itself. The hotel building is separate from the main buildings with the chapel and event space, a taller building down towards the end of the campus. Presumably, it’s the old dormitory building for the Catholic seminarians.
You enter through a small courtyard within a large atrium, flanked by one of the hotel’s onsite restaurants. Interior brickwork, a fireplace, couches, balconies, and skylights overhead.
In the winter, the rates are actually pretty reasonable, comparable to other hotels in the area. The golf course is closed, there aren’t many weddings happening, and there really isn’t much else around in the area. It’s definitely the off season.
The rooms themselves are nice, but not exactly decadent. Well-appointed, comfortable, but there’s sort of a top level that nice hotel rooms never exceed, regardless of where you stay. The sheets were cotton, the bed comfortable, and the bathroom spacious and well equipped.
The minibar on the counter was surprising but welcome, you rarely see those in hotels anymore. It felt like a holdover from ages past, even if undoubtedly expensive and left unused. Something about an assortment of nice liquor bottles and mixers greeting you in a hotel room feels like luxury.
There’s some literature in the rooms, and a plaque by the entrance, describing the hotel and its designation as a humanitarian hotel, part of a broader initiative by the Pulte Family Charity Foundation (the Pulte family owns the property). It’s one of three hotels in the initiative, the others being the Inn at Stonecliffe on Mackinac Island and a Hilton in Laramie, Wyoming.
The concept for the Humanitarian Hotel initiative is to operate these luxury hotels and send the profits off to charities and organizations. The project claims $10.4 million in donations to 191 organizations spanning 31 countries in 2024 alone.
It’s a nice sentiment, and it certainly feels better than giving your money to a chain hotel brand. Yet most people are unlikely to choose Saint John’s for this reason alone.
They’ll stay at the hotel for a wedding, or for golf, or for a nice date night. Or, like me, as a travel writer simply passing through for another assignment in the doldrums of a late Michigan winter.
Yet, it’s a memorable place, far more so than other hotels in its class. The distinctive architecture alone makes it worth a visit. It retains that same feeling of a cloistered oasis separated from the rest of the world.
Saint John’s may be more worldly now, without seminarians roaming its halls, but the uniqueness hasn’t left it and neither has the aura. Whether it’s the best hotel in all of Michigan or not, we’ll let them battle that out with the Grand Hotel and Detroit’s Shinola Hotel.
It certainly belongs on that list, however, and we’re happy to see yet another impressive tourism gem for Michigan making waves.
