Ten years ago today, on October 27, 2016, Priscilla Presley stood outside with a big pair of scissors and a ribbon that was blue suede. Priscilla was Elvis Presley’s wife back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and long after they split she stayed the keeper of his legacy. On this morning she was right across the street from Graceland, the Memphis mansion where Elvis lived for twenty years.
For a long time, fans who traveled from all over the world to see Graceland had no real place to stay close by. That changed the second Priscilla’s ribbon fell.
What she opened was a hotel. Not a small one either.
The Guest House at Graceland is a 450-room hotel built right across the road from the mansion, and it cost around $90 million. Priscilla didn’t just show up to cut the ribbon. She helped design the place, overseeing its 20 themed suites down to the little touches. The main stairwell is a copy of the famous staircase inside Graceland, chandelier and all, so you feel like you’ve walked into Elvis’s world before you’ve even found your room.
Here’s the part most people don’t know. The idea wasn’t new.
Joel Weinshanker, one of the owners of Graceland, said Elvis himself “had plans to build a guest house.” Elvis and Priscilla were always hosting friends and family at the mansion, and Elvis had wanted somewhere nearby to put everybody up. He never got the chance. So in a way, Priscilla finished something he’d started in his head decades earlier.
She said it best standing there that day.
Priscilla walked the TODAY show cameras through the finished hotel before the first guests arrived. You get to hear her talk about the rooms she dreamed up and what she thinks Elvis would’ve made of all of it.
Priscilla Presley walks through the new hotel room by room
“Would he ever stay in this hotel? I mean, this would be a dream hotel for him!” Priscilla said. Coming from the woman who knew his taste better than anyone, that’s about the highest praise the place could get.
The grand opening wasn’t just a ribbon and a photo. It ran four days, from that Thursday through the weekend. And three men who used to stand behind Elvis on stage came back to play. James Burton, his longtime guitar player. Glen D. Hardin on piano. Ronnie Tutt on the drums. For a lot of folks in the crowd, hearing those three again was the real goosebump moment.
Scenes from the four-day grand opening weekend
Up at the very top sits a floor called The Upstairs. Priscilla and her team built it to echo the private family quarters inside Graceland, the part of the mansion that tour groups never get to walk through. It’s as close as most people will ever come to that side of Elvis’s home.
Ten years on, the beds are still full most nights. Elvis never saw it finished. But the folks who run Graceland say it’s exactly the kind of welcome he always liked to give.