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The building was too old, too small and just too expensive to maintain.

And yet for the past 30 years the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Oregon and Southwest Washington made the best of its 17-room facility on Marquam Hill. The nonprofit, which provides housing for families with seriously ill children, purchased the building because it’s near Oregon Health & Science University Hospital. But the RMHC facility is now 71 years old.

“It had outlived its useful life,” said Tom Soma, the organization’s executive director. “The rooms were all very small and we were cramming families of four and five into a room that you wouldn’t want to put two people in – better than nothing, but not ideal.”

Now, RMHC, OHSU and the Marriott Residence Inn have come up with an innovative partnership that may become a model for other RMHC locations around the world. For the next two years, the organization will lease the entire fifth floor of the Marriott Residence Inn in the South Waterfront District.

OHSU is paying for the lease. RMHC invested $75,000 in renovations to turn spaces like conference centers into living rooms, and add other finishing touches to make the hotel feel like a “home away from home.”

The arrangement isn’t new for the Residence Inn. For more than seven years, the hotel has hosted an OHSU sleep lab. That also required some interior design work, including creation of control rooms where technicians could monitor patients. So when OHSU officials learned that RMHC was leaving its Marquam Hill facility, they approached Residence Inn officials about new possibilities.

“Really, we’re designed for long-term stays and so having families that are here for a long time is a good fit for them (because) they have more space to be comfortable,” said Aaron Watne, the hotel’s general manager. “It definitely has evolved from our standpoint as well, not knowing what to expect when we were first approached.”

In the beginning, people held their breath, so to speak. Soma, for instance, didn’t want RMHC families feeling any different than regular hotel guests.

So, while RMHC has its own floor, the families have access to all of the hotel’s amenities. The pool has been a big hit with kids, but a sauna and a fitness center are available too. Every room has a kitchen with appliances, as well as standard-issue flat screen TVs. The Residence Inn also provides breakfast daily and dinner either two or three days per week – a service that previously was handled entirely by volunteers.

RMHC had just two and a half months after signing a lease agreement until it moved into the hotel. For the most part, the Residence Inn still looks like a hotel; however, there are little touches that stand out. Hallways, for instance, feature vinyl cutouts of animals so that parents can tell their kids they’re in the “octopus” or “hermit crab” room.

Soma bubbled with enthusiasm as he showed the space.

“This is our teen room,” he said of a suite that had gained couches, books, paintings and toys. “We’re still waiting on the Wii … This is the first time I’ve come in in the past few visits where there haven’t been a bunch of kids running around.”

In the hallway, Soma greeted one of those kids – a young girl with a surgery scar on her bald scalp – as she waited with her mother for an elevator. Families’ navigation between the hotel and the hospital elicited some concerns.

“My biggest fear in all of this was the transportation piece,” said Kevin O’Boyle, a senior administrator for OHSU.

While families could easily walk from the former RMHC facility to the hospital, they now must take either a cab or a shuttle and then the tram to reach the hospital. That was worrisome for managers, but after nearly three months of operations Soma said it hasn’t become an issue.

“It’s another example of where everybody we’ve asked to step up and help out in this situation has done so,” O’Boyle said.

For now, the arrangement is only temporary. OHSU is in the early stages of determining the size and location of a potential new hospitality house.

In the meantime, RMHC has entered into a purchase and sale agreement for the organization’s former facility. Soma said the buyer’s identity is confidential, but in early September it applied for early planning assistance with the city of Portland for a “proposed multi-unit housing project with on-site parking.”

The next two years will also be an experiment of sorts for RMHC. Leasing hotel space could be a prudent model not only for other aging facilities, but also facilities that are damaged in natural disasters.

“The Ronald McDonald House has always been (of the mindset that) ‘we’re a building,’ ” Soma said. “What we’ve learned is we’re a program. It comes with people. It comes with energy. It comes with care. And that program is mobile. We were able to package that program and relocate it into a space that wasn’t designed for this, and we were able to do it I think very successfully in a short period of time.”