The exterior of yellow “French Lick Brick” was added in 1901. I had been reading about the hotel for years, and couldn’t wait to check it out. An additional 56 guestrooms and a new sports bar are under construction near the hotel’s event center and casino. Today, hundreds of millions of dollars of restoration and remodeling later, the French Lick Springs Hotel is a thriving enterprise once again, with 443 rooms, a casino, 165,000 square feet of event space, and all the amenities a visitor could want from a bowling alley to three golf courses. The hotel, a AAA four diamond property along with its sister property one mile to the north, the West Baden Springs Hotel, is part of French Lick Resort which is owned by the Cook Group.

They enlisted the help of the billionaire Cook family of Bloomington, Indiana, who bought the property in 2005. It started as a spa hotel in 1845, went through several owners, burned down, was rebuilt and remodeled a couple of times, and, beginning a few decades ago, went into a slow decline.Īlong came Indiana Landmarks, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit with a particular interest in historic buildings. The French Lick Springs Hotel, 8670 West State Road 56, French Lick, Indiana, is an unlikely success story in the 21st Century.

French lick casino