The Telegraph's online review terms it a "gorgeous Victorian firehouse turned boutique hotel near buzzy Kendall Square" and asserts that its "Black Sheep restaurant is a gem".

Renovation involved moving the original three-story firehouse closer to the street, adding a seven-story tower behind, and restoring two cupolas.

[4] The Washington Post in 2017 included "Kendall Hotel at the Engine 7 Firehouse" in a list of 23 American "hotel retrofits", as "part of a trend toward historic adaptive reuse that has travelers overnighting in former department stores, textile mills, an auto assembly plant and even a 19th-century jail.".

[6] On 8 August 1910, Gamaliel Bradford VII (18 June 1888–8 August 1910), a descendant of Pilgrim leader William Bradford, one of the first governors of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and the son of biographer Gamaliel Bradford VI, checked into the Kendall Hotel around 10:15 AM, and told clerk John Hogan that he "needed to rest".

At 10:30 AM, Bradford shot himself and was transported to nearby Framingham Hospital, where he died four hours later.