It’s Always a Holiday Weekend at Mepal Manor & Gedney Farm
Gedney Farm hosts lavish rural weddings.
Brad Wagstaff and Leslie Miller are the accidental wedding planners. When they arrived (separately) in the Berkshires more than thirty years ago, they were each pursuing a rural, crunchy-granola lifestyle after stints in cities. He had run a financial magazine in New York, and she had baked cookies for the concession stand at Boston’s Orson Welles Cinema. When they met, they discovered they shared an appreciation of historic architecture, an eye for beauty, and a taste for sophisticated food. When they renovated New Marlborough’s Old Inn on the Green and opened it as a B&B in 1979, they had no clear ambition. They didn’t really have a business plan when they opened the Old Inn as a restaurant in 1982 (with Michele Miller in the kitchen), creating an upscale-but-down-to-earth dining experience in 18th century rooms lit only by candlelight. (They sold the restaurant a few years ago to chef Peter Platt.) When they purchased Gedney Farm up the road in 1980, they were happy to have 80 dairy cows living in one of their two barns. “We milked them night and day for six years,” recalls Wagstaff. Then one day in the late 1980s a woman drove up to Gedney Farm and told the stunned couple: “I want to have my daughter’s wedding in your barn!” It seemed feasible, so they were suddenly and unexpectedly in the wedding business.
Now, 21 years later, Gedney Farm and Mepal Manor are a destination wedding venue that’s both rustic and luxurious. The event barn is spare enough that brides and grooms can art direct their weddings to look like catalog shoots for—take your pick—Anthropologie, J. Crew, or Ralph Lauren. “We’ve had every type of wedding imaginable,” says Miller, looking up at the rafters and then offering a stack of photo albums of weddings that all look worthy of Martha Stewart Living. “We’ve had weddings with gingham tablecloths and hay bales, and we’ve had black tie weddings with crystal chandeliers.”
Once they started having weddings, they got rid of the cows and renovated the other barn so it could function as an inn. “We toured renovated barns all over New England to get ideas,” says Wagstaff who worked with architect Robert Edson Swain on a design that managed to maintain the barn’s character and openness while still creating 16 luxurious bedrooms and suites. The downstairs rooms boast wood-burning fireplaces while the upstairs rooms have whirlpool tubs with interior skylights that look up at the original rafters. The overall effect is one of utter enchantment that puts wedding guests in the right mood.
The concept of the wedding weekend has evolved into an elaborate ritual, according to Miller and Wagstaff. “The first change was that kids did not want to do what their parents did—they did not want to get married in a hotel or country club,” says Wagstaff. “They like the idea of a farm because it was simpler, but they also wanted it fancier.” To accommodate changing mores, the couple bought neighboring Mepal Manor, a formidable 1906 house that had been both a private residence and then a boarding school. “We wanted to have more rooms for wedding guests and we also wanted to have a spa.” says Wagstaff. As Miller wryly notes: “Brides today like to get manicures and do yoga or pilates with their bridesmaids before the wedding.” Their spa is the school’s former gymnasium that architect Swain retrofitted so it feels like an exclusive Zen retreat in northern California. It is open to the public by appointment for everything from a hot stone massage ($160 for 80 minutes) and a mud wrap ($120 for 75 minutes) to a bikini wax ($30) and a blow out ($40). They rent out part of the gym during the week to Gymnastics Unlimited which offers classes and birthday parties.
The only downside to getting married at Gedney Farm is that couples are rarely able to return to celebrate their anniversaries there because the inn is invariably booked with another wedding. “We run a special Valentine’s Day promotion for them,” says Miller (left, with Wagstaff on Mepal Manor’s back terrace.) “We also have special packages from Sunday to Thursday for tourists. As everyone knows, the best time to be in the Berkshires, especially in summer, is during the week.” And for those vacationers as well as locals, there is now dinner service on Wednesdays and Thursdays at Mepal Manor.
Gedney Farm & Mepal Manor & Spa
Route 57, New Marlborough, MA
800.286.3139
413. 229.7501
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/30/10 at 06:21 PM • Permalink
The Spirit of Bohemia Lives at Sheffield’s Race Brook Lodge
Allegra Scott Graham and David Rothstein outside the Race Brook Lodge
Before it became a brand, the Berkshires was a state of mind. If you’re searching for that now mythic land where Alice’s Restaurant was not just a song but a place where hippies congregated, you can start at Race Brook Lodge in Sheffield, MA. Owned by David Rothstein, an architect who once worked as a model-maker for Louis Kahn (whose reputation as a visionary was cemented by the documentary My Architect), Race Brook Lodge offers its guests a funky, crunchy-granola ambiance along with farm-to-table cuisine at its sister restaurant, the Stagecoach Tavern, which is managed by Allegra Scott Graham, Rothstein’s longtime partner.
Once a Young Turk who staged outdoor folk and rock concerts in Lenox at the legendary Music Inn during the 1970s, Rothstein is now a rumpled raconteur, a grand seigneur who drives a 1980 Mercedes fueled by bio-diesel from his restaurant’s kitchen. Over the past twenty years, he has carved up the 200-year-old barn into 15 bedrooms (he lives on the top floor beneath the cupola) and renovated rooms in other buildings on the property so now there are 32 guest rooms. There’s also an entertaining barn—brought over in pieces from New York State on a flatbed truck and reassembled in a post-modern fashion—that is rented out for weddings and retreats. “Our first retreat was with the Hoffman Quadrinity Process, and they have been coming back five or six times a year for a decade,” says Graham. “We also get a group from the Harvard School of Public Health.”
Staying at Race Brook Lodge, which is adjacent to Mount Everett State Reservation and the Appalachian Trail, is like spending the night with slightly eccentric, intellectual friends who have more dash than cash. There are no telephones, TVs or minibars in the rooms, though there is an honor bar in the main barn where guests can help themselves to a beer. Graham has decorated the guest rooms with style on a shoestring. “I discovered tag sales, and little by little I’ve patched up the rooms,” she says. “I’m always making do. I’ve never been able to do an entire room from scratch.”
These days, Graham focuses most of her attention on the next-door Stagecoach Tavern—a quintessentially New England restaurant with an arty flair—that Rothstein purchased about seven years ago. “I bought the building for its guest rooms and we planned to rent out the restaurant to someone else, but that did not work out so we took it on ourselves,” he says. They hired Dan Smith of John Andrews as a consultant in the beginning, and eventually hired Smith’s pastry chef, Sarah Dibben, as the chef. “Sarah has worked very hard to make us a farm-to-table restaurant,” says Graham, who notes that Bjorn Somlo (before opening his highly regarded Nudel) ran the kitchen while Dibben was on maternity leave. “Sarah has given the restaurant a vibrant and heartfelt connection,” says Graham. “She supports our local farmers, and we sponsored a dinner for them last year out on our porch. Her new Sunday Supper menu, which changes every week, has really caught on.”
Rothstein and Graham have endless projects. They are planting an herb and cutting garden. “We want to grow all our own flowers for our guest rooms and restaurant,” says Graham, who is constantly tweaking the look of the dining rooms with flea market finds. Rothstein is “de-junkifying” and rebuilding the greenhouse that he hopes can be used as a dining room. He’s forever working on his boat, a 44-foot 1940 Elco Cruisette that he used to dock at New York’s 79th Street Boat Basin, which now sits under a tarp in the middle of the property along with a 1940s tractor that he’s repairing. “David grew up on a farm in New Jersey, and he’s uncomfortable if there aren’t a few pieces of rusted farm equipment lying around,” says Graham.
Rothstein’s thinking about organizing some reunion concerts this summer to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Music Inn, which opened with Arlo Guthrie and introduced a young James Taylor to the Berkshires in 1970. (When he bought Music Inn, it had been abandoned after being a hot spot for jazz in the 1950s, which is the subject of a documentary that his son Casey Meade Rothstein-Fitzpatrick helped make.) He is still at heart a music impresario who plans to resuscitate the Stagecoach basement as the Down County Lounge. Meanwhile, Graham runs the front of the restaurant, he chats up guests, an engaging eminence grise, who’s on call to fix a leaky pipe or electrical short on a moment’s notice. “David,” Graham says affectionately, “is our roving bon vivant.”
Race Brook Lodge & Stagecoach Tavern
Route 41, Sheffield, MA; 413.229.2916/413.229.8585
Summer rates: $105 -$290
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/21/10 at 04:07 PM • Permalink
Salisbury’s White Hart Inn Gets A Makeover
Scott and Roxanne Bok are accidental innkeepers. A decade ago, as they were looking for a new weekend house in Salisbury, CT, they learned that the venerable White Hart Inn was in financial trouble. “I thought I could help them out,” says Scott, a prominent Manhattan investment banker, who grew up in rural Michigan and exudes an earnest midwestern matter-of-factness. “One thing led to another, and we bought it,” The Boks had been spending weekend in northwestern Connecticut since 1989, and they intuitively understood that they’d become caretakers as much as owners of the White Hart, which was built as a humble inn and tavern in 1803. 
“People had their own ideas of what a grande dame is supposed to be, and we knew that any changes we would make might upset people,” says Roxanne. “For ten years, we just observed and let it be what it was.” Last fall, with business slow because of the economic downturn, the Boks (who are major benefactors of regional arts organizations like TriArts and Shakespeare & Company) decided it was time for a soup-to-nuts renovation and redecoration.
“It was a spur of the moment decision,” allows Scott, who knew he’d hire Matthew Patrick Smyth, a New York designer with a weekend house in nearby Sharon, who had decorated the public rooms and guest suites at their Twin Lakes Farm down the road. 
The Boks wanted the White Hart to be more luxurious than other mid-range hotels in the area but not as fancy as super-deluxe inns like Blantyre or The Mayflower. To create the graciousness the Boks wanted, Smyth reduced the number of rooms from 26 to 15. The third-floor is now a two-bedroom “penthouse” suite with a kitchen and a sexy stall shower in one of the dormers that overlooks the the flagpole and church steeples. “It’s great for a family or two couples,” says Smyth.
Every room has been individually decorated. “Matthew did not use the same wallpaper twice,” says Roxanne. The Boks encouraged him to shop locally, and all the mattresses came from Riley’s Furniture in Millerton, rugs came from Hammertown Barn, table lamps from Lamplighter in Great Barrington, and the windows from Herrington’s. “Philip Watson of Vintage Lighting in Great Barrington designed the new porch light fixture for us,” says Smyth, who choose a fresh, soothing palette for the bedrooms. “I didn’t want it to be too cool or too warm—I wanted it to feel right in all seasons.”
The Boks have not only changed the White Hart’s look but also its focus. “The inn used to do a lot of weddings and banquets and we have gotten out of that business,” says Scott. “We really wanted to focus on serving the locals every day of the week by expanding the restaurant.” The registration desk has been moved to the back of the front hall, which has become an airy place for cocktails or a meal in front of a woodburning fire (right.) The panelling in the once fallow Hunt Room has been re-stained and hung with plein air landscape paintings by Emily Buchanan of Cornwall. The Tap Room, with its charming Arts & Crafts wallpaper, looks as if nothing has been touched even though Smith had all the woodwork refinished and added new lighting. “We’ve kept it very accessible—there are no white tablecloths,” says Roxanne, noting that meals will now be served on the front porch for the first time. “And wherever you sit, you can order a hamburger.”
That hamburger will be made of grass-fed beef that was raised four miles away at Twin Lakes Farm, which the Boks bought a few years ago and immediately placed under a conservation easement. “We now supply our own beef, eggs, vegetables and soon we’ll have fish,” says Scott. Fish? “We have an aquaponic greenhouse and we are going to raise rainbow trout and striped bass and use the filtered water for the vegetables. There was a New York Times article about this process very recently.” At the end of May, the Boks will set up a farm stand on the White Hart’s lawn (which is also known as the Village Green though most of the land belongs to the inn) to sell their meat and vegetables. As they finished Sunday lunch on the porch last weekend with their nine-year-old daughter, Jane, they marveled at the skills of their new 28-year-old chef, David Miller, who is making nearly everything in-house, including bread and chocolates. “He can go to our greenhouse and farm to ‘shop’ for produce,” says Roxanne. “He’s talking about doing his own butchering, too.”
The Boks have heard grumblings from locals who think the White Hart has become too fancy (though the Sunday bikers in their leathers lunching there on Sunday did not seem to feel out of place.) “We put in more than we took out. I think it looks more like a 19th century inn now than it did before,” says Roxanne, noting improvements like new floors made of antique wood and wainscoting in the hallways. The Boks replaced all the mechanicals and windows and put on a new roof and added insulation where there had been none. Smyth points out that the White Hart had been on a slow, sure path to obsolescence. “I think the Boks saved it for the next 200 years,” he says.
The White Hart
15 Undermountain Road, Salisbury, CT; 860.435.0030
Weekend rates: $299 - $409
Weekday rates: $269 - $379
Penthouse: $559 weekdays; $629 weekends
Full breakfast included with all rooms
Interior photographs by John Gruen
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/14/10 at 02:49 PM • Permalink
RI Selects: A Midwinter Staycation - A Night in North Adams
A room with a fireplace at Porches in North Adams
“Creative collaboration” has become a mantra in the Berkshires, and the special “Get-a-Waypoint” package that the Porches Inn has put together for Saturday, February 6, is a culinary-and-cultural sampler. The genesis was the Berkshire Fringe Festival’s winter residency at MASS MoCA, which culminates on Saturday night with a work-in-progress performance of The Waypoint by playwright by Iris Dauterman. The story of a pregnant woman who’s unsure about her capabilities of being a mother and her soon-to-be-born baby who is unsure about wanting to make his way to earth, the play is in the magical realism tradition, which inspired Brian Alberg, the executive chef at the Red Lion Inn, to create a special pre-theater dinner.
“Brian loves to come up to Porches from time to time and prepare a special meal,” explains Carol Bosco Baumann of the Red Lion. “He played around with The Waypoint‘s themes of rebirth and transformation to create a five-course menu.” The meal begins with a “BLT,” which is a soup of house-cured bacon, wilted organic arugula & smoked tomatoes, and it ends with PB&J, which is a peanut butter ice cream and shortbread cookie sandwich with concord grape whipped cream. “We serve the meal family style so you can meet new people who are also interested in the arts,” says Bauman. “When you return to Porches after the performance, you’ll know people who you can discuss it with over breakfast if you like.” And remember to pack your bathing suit. Porches keeps its outdoor pool and hot tub open 365 days a year.
Get-a-Waypoint Package
$250 for two.
Porches
North Adams, MA; 413.664.0400
Performance only:
The Waypoint at MASS MoCA
February 6; 8 p.m.
$10
Related posts:
The Porches Inn at MASS MoCA, May 5, 2009
Twenty Questions for MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson, May 20, 2009
Jarvis Rockwell - The Son Also Rises, May 5, 2009
Friend of the Fringe Come Together, July 29, 2009
Jack’s Hot Dog Stand, November 22, 2009
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/02/10 at 08:56 PM • Permalink
Rooms With A View: Bascom Lodge Reopens on Mount Greylock
Breakfast in the dining room at Bascom Lodge on Mt. Greylock
There’s nowhere better to take in the fall foliage than a mountaintop with panoramic views, and once again, after a couple of years of work that kept the road to the summit closed, you can drive to the top of Mt. Greylock, which is the highest peak in Massachusetts at 3,491 feet. And if you want to see the magnificent sunrises and sunsets and spend the night you no longer have to pack a sleeping bag and a tent now that historic Bascom Lodge has reopened. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression in classic National Parks-style, Bascom Lodge has been leased by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
(through the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Historic Curatorship Program) to native sons John and Peter Dudek, who grew up in Adams, MA, and Brad Parsons. The trio—John’s a chef, Peter’s an artist/teacher who runs the Storefront Artist Project in Pittsfield, and Brad’s a textile designer—have a 25-year lease and a ten-year plan to restore the lodge, which was in dismal condition when they took it over this spring. They have spruced it up enough so they can accommodate overnight visitors and serve breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as offering special events like Wednesday night readings, performances and lectures. They will also rent the lodge for weddings.
Bascom Lodge is not the only historic structure on the summit: There’s the lighthouse-like War Memorial Tower (left in a vintage postcard) that was erected in 1932 and looks as if it belongs in a Hitchcock film. Make sure you go inside and study the mosaic ceiling and decaying gilded lettering on the walls that spell out aphorisms like “Sleep Well, Heroic Soul, In Silence Sleep Lapped In The Circling Arms of Kindly Death.”
Don’t expect Bascom Lodge to be a resort. The bedrooms are Spartan and the bathrooms are shared, but the food is hearty and, if you’re lucky, you will dine by a crackling fire in the paneled dining room. Reservations are required for breakfast and dinner, but anyone who is visiting the 12,500 acre Mt. Greylock State Reservation can just show up for lunch, which includes a pulled pork sandwich on ciabatta ($7.50) and Jamaican Jerked Chicken on a toasted ciabatta ($6.50).
Nancy Fitzpatrick, the hotelier who runs the Red Lion Inn and Porches, spent the night in early September and plans to return, though she would prefer a few more amenities. “It’s very simple,” she told Rural Intelligence. “The beds are comfortable but the rooms are sparse, to say the least. A dresser and a bed, period. However, the food is good and it’s a bit of an adventure. For a mountain top, it seems positively deluxe…or will once they get those big fireplaces fired up.”
Bascom Lodge
Adams, MA
413.743.1591
Private Rooms: $100 - $125
Group bunkbed rooms: $35 per person
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 09/25/09 at 08:19 PM • Permalink
The Winthrop Estate: New Life for a Gilded Age Mansion
In 2002, when Jamie and Ethan Berg were living in Cambridge, MA, and expecting their first child they started to explore the real estate market in the Berkshires. Their broker mischievously asked them: “You wouldn’t be interested in a 15,000 square foot mansion in the middle of Lenox, would you?” The Bergs didn’t think they were, but they were intrigued and went to look at the Winthrop Estate anyway. They were bewitched and besotted. “Our breath was taken away!” says Ethan. By happenstance, the Bergs had found a place where they could nurture a dream to revive “the 19th century tradition of leading an intellectual life in a social setting” by making the house a venue for exploring “music, the arts, ideas and fine cuisine in good company.”
Like so many of the gilded age mansions, the 1927 Tudor house was dying a slow death. It had been barely touched for decades and was about to be foreclosed even though it was being used improbably as a corporate headquarters. “There were fluorescent lights and office carpeting, but it seemed to have beautiful bones,” says Ethan, who recalls all the people who worked there wore heavy coats because the thermostat was kept low since it was so expensive to heat the place. Ethan cut a deal with the owner to prevent the foreclosure even though the Bergs were unclear about what they would do with a 12-bedroom house.
By then, Ethan had become the manager for a private investment partnership after a successful stint at the high-powered Monitor management consulting firm, so he could run his new business from anywhere. In 2003, the Bergs (photographed right at Tanglewood this summer) moved into the house and camped out in the paneled library because it was the coziest room and had a working fireplace. (After six months, they moved next door to a modest 1950s house that is also part of the 45 acre estate, where they live with children, Joshua, 7, and Arden, 4.) “I would sit in the empty mansion and try to take cues from it,” says Ethan. “I thought, Let’s lead with quality and the rest will take care of itself.”
He envisioned the house filled with music and interesting people—and now it is. The Bergs have developed parallel missions for the mansion, which is known as both the Lenox Athenaeum and the Winthrop Estate. As the Atheneum, it hosts readings (by authors such as Simon Winchester), chocolate and wine tastings, and chamber music concerts (with superstars like Emanuel Ax or Yehuda Hanani, who stores his piano in their music room) for charities like the Lenox Library or Charley’s Fund. As the Winthrop Estate, it can be rented out in its entirety for family reunions or weddings. “You can have the whole wedding party stay together in the house, and have the ceremony and reception here, too,” says Jamie, a former personal trainer at Canyon Ranch who acts a concierge for whatever group is in residence. “You can stay up late and have breakfast in your bathrobes. It’s not like being at an inn or B&B. It’s all yours.”
The Bergs have renovated and decorated the mansion (with help from Lenox neighbor Daniel Dempsey) so that it feels like a private house that’s been well-kept by generations of the same blue-blooded family. 
It has an old money elegance like someplace rented out by a duchess in the English countryside to help pay the taxes. “I wanted it to look like the most beautiful place I knew, which was the Tea Room at the old Ritz-Carlton in Boston,” says Ethan. As luck would have it, the Ritz was shut for renovations when they bought the house, and Ethan learned that all the furniture had been shipped to a warehouse in Ohio. He flew out to the midwest and bought desks, lamps and chairs, which is why the house has an authentic Brahmin aura. “Everything we’ve done has been a non-linear, organic process,” says Ethan. “We held off on renovating specific spaces in the house until we really felt we had the right design, the skilled craftsmen, and the right materials to do it in an exquisite way.” The house still has its stately steel casement windows and the original bathroom fixtures with their heavy nickel handles and faucets. “They used the absolutely finest of everything when they built this house which is why it lasted,” he says.
That Tanglewood is two minutes away is no coincidence. Indeed, Tanglewood was a key factor in their choosing to move to the Berkshires. “In 2000, before we had kids, we decided to take a year off to bicycle around the world,” says Ethan. “It gave us a lot of time to talk about what type of life we wanted to live as a family.” They came up with four criteria for the ideal domicile. “It needed to have a rich cultural/intellectual life, beautiful nature, good bicycling, and a sense of community.” They determined that four places in the world had what they wanted: Kyoto, Tuscany, the region around Valencia, Spain, and the Berkshires; it was finding the Winthrop Estate that sealed their fate.
On a recent Monday night, the Bergs had 70 guests for a chamber music concert featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Society Hill String Quintet (some of the musicians stayed overnight in the upstairs rooms), which was a fundraiser for the Lenox Library. The guests drank wine in the main hall and on the verandah before the program, and gathered in the dining room and conservatory afterwards for dessert. The musicians were as thrilled to be there as the audience, because performing chamber music in the intimacy of a house is really how chamber music was meant to be heard. “We look forward to performing here all year long,” said violist Judy Geist. Ethan Berg smiled his kid-in-a-candy-store grin. “That’s music to my ears,” he said.
The Lenox Athenaeum & The Winthrop Estate
101 Yokun Avenue, Lenox, MA; 413.637.5600
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/19/09 at 07:12 AM • Permalink
Kripalu Weathers Change by Being Flexible and Disciplined
Change is never easy but when change comes to a beloved institution, one that has been a source of succor for tens of thousands, it can be downright dangerous. This is why cathedrals are built to last.
The brains behind Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, a “cathedral” of sorts to the 28,000 pilgrims who visit it each year, have proven to be adept at navigating the choppy waters of change. Founded in Sumneytown, PA in 1972 by Yogi Amrit Desai, Kripalu is the only yoga center in North America known to have successfully made the transition from exclusive ashram to welcoming retreat-and-education center for paying guests. It also has been a major catalyst in the change in the public’s perception of yoga over the last 37 years. Without 5,000 certified Kripalu Yoga teachers spreading the gospel worldwide, it is doubtful that anything like 20 million Americans would be practicing yoga today.
Shiva knows, Kripalu has not gotten where it is on its looks. Though set on a stunning 100-acre campus, once Andrew Carnegie’s Shadowbrook Estate, its main building, also called Shadowbrook, was constructed hastily in 1956 as a Jesuit novitiate, to replace the 100-room Carnegie mansion after it burnt to the ground. The best that can be said of Shadowbrook 2: the building is solid. The worst: it is borderline institutional grim, both uninspired and uninspiring. More to the point, many of the sleeping accommodations in it are best suited to ascetics—dormitory-style with shared baths.
Today, the health benefits of yoga are irrefutable, so all sorts of people want a room in the inn—a nice, quiet, private one with a view of the mountains and lake, and an en suite bath. Once again Kripalu has met the challenge of change without alarming its core constituency (not too much, anyhow). From the outside, the new 6-story “green” Annex, designed by the Cambridge architectural firm Peter Rose & Partners, could pass for a hip, modern Swiss ski resort, with it’s manually-operated sliding exterior shutters, cleverly engineered to filter direct gain by day and offer privacy by night, without blocking airflow or the views from within. The southern cypress from which the slats were milled was salvaged from trees felled in New Orleans by hurricane Katrina. The wood will eventually weather to a gentle gray.
But it is inside the new wing that the delicate balance between simplicity and comfort is most evident. In addition to an airy 2,800 square-foot program room (above), there are eighty double and single rooms that are at once cheerful and spartan. On the spartan side, there are no closets—just small bedside cupboards, a small bureau with a bar above just big enough to hold a few hangers, and a couple of hooks for clothes, though Kripalu is going to be adding more storage to the rooms. On the cheerful side, each room is bright and airy with a stunning view and, thanks to a large interior window separating the en suite bedroom-and-bath, guests may soak or shower by natural light, while taking in the vista. “Our guests don’t come here to watch tv and talk on the phone,” says Jennifer Webster, Kripalu’s Director of Operations, by way of explaining the absence of in-room phones and tv screens. No, but some do want a measure of comfort, quiet, and privacy, and the rooms in the Annex certainly provide that.
Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health
Route 183
Stockbridge, MA 413.448.458 or 800.741.7353
Private rooms and doubles in both Shadowbrook and the Annex are $294 per person per weekend night or $263 midweek. This includes 3 meals daily, yoga classes, and use of the fitness room, sauna and whirlpool. Kripalu offers literally hundreds of additional programs each year, many targeted at yoga instructors, all outlined in their catalog. The cost of programs is additional.
Kripalu for locals:
For those who wish to visit Kripalu without staying the night, there is a Kripalu Day Pass ($100 per day in season and on off-season weekends; $75 mid-week November 3 to June 1, which covers Retreat & Renewal activities, including yoga (many kinds) and other classes, hiking, kayaking, plus three meals and Kripalu at Night offerings.
To practice Kripalu yoga off-site, the Berkshire Kripalu Community has classes for members. Members of BKC may attend Kripalu at Night programs for free. For $18, a member also may have dinner there.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/19/09 at 12:45 PM • Permalink
Lodgings: The Inn at Hudson, a One-Doily B & B
What do you do when it dawns on you, too late, that you may have bought more house than you can afford to maintain? That’s easy; turn it into a b & b. At least, it was easy for Dini Lamot and Windle Davis.
A little background: The couple met in 1974, and later with some friends formed a Boston-based rock band, Human Sexual Response. Still later, after they had lived in a lot of fun places (Key West, Cape Cod, Vermont, Hollywood) and had bought, fixed up, and sold a lot of fun houses, they settled in Hudson and took a stab at becoming impresarios. Dini, performing as Musty Chiffon*,
appeared occasionally at their cabaret, The Hudson River Theater, but mostly they booked out-of-town acts. As an economy measure, they usually would invite the traveling performers to stay with them for free. So it wasn’t much of a leap to dub their new fix-up project The Inn at Hudson and start taking in paying guests.
In fact, it would be kind of criminal not to share a house this great. The Dutch-Jacobean style-structure was designed in 1903 by the architect Marcus T. Reynolds** for the scion of a soap-manufacturing family. The interior, considered one of his finest achievements, has a soaring paneled central reception hall and a broad staircase leading to a three-sided balcony—all woodwork fashioned from solid chestnut. Throughout the 8 bedroom structure, there are 42 stained-glass windows, most done with rare finesse and restraint. Though they are unsigned, the present owners make a credible case for their having been the work of William Lightfoot Price, a prominent early 20th-century architect who took a year’s hiatus to make stained glass in a Utopian community he founded called Rose Valley. His work was so distinguished that one of his windows—its unusual style indistinguishable from the best ones in this house—is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. “I have not found paperwork to substantiate that Price is the artist,” says Windle, “although it seems obvious that he is.”
For a couple of decades between its heyday as a grand private residence and the day Windle and Dini rescued it, Reynold’s masterpiece served as a rather grim nursing home. The room that is once again a sun-filled solarium, a magnet for coffee-and-newspaper-bearing guests on Sunday
mornings, had been subsumed by a meanly utilitarian addition, now blessedly gone.
“This is a one-doily b and b,” says Dini, whose ranking system goes from 0 doilies to 10, and is not so much a measure of the quality of the decorating, as its weight. In fact, most rooms at The Inn at Hudson seem merely furnished, some with good antiques from Windle’s family, but most with things the couple have collected over the years. (But for some wild lamps in the library, this might even be a zero-doily b & b.) Because of this restraint, The Inn at Hudson is a great favorite with New York artists and other visual sophisticates, most of whom, according to the owners, arrive by train. “We’re just blocks from the station,” says Windle. “They are here to see Hudson, and to eat some good locally-grown food.” For dinner, according to the innkeepers, their guests invariably head for Swoon one night, and “someplace else” another. At breakfast Dini accommodates by serving such delicacies as a pair of perfectly poached local eggs on wholegrain toast with tomatilla (from their garden) salsa.
* Musty will be appearing on July 30 at the Spiegeltent at Bard Summerscape.
** Reynolds also designed the curious, castle-like structure in Albany that sits hard by southbound Route 787. Originally called the Delaware and Hudson and Albany Evening Journal Building, it now is part of SUNY Albany. The weathervane that sits atop one of its turrets is a replica of the Halfmoon, Henry Hudson’s ship.
The Inn at Hudson
317 Allen Street, Hudson; 518.822.9322
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/21/09 at 06:02 AM • Permalink
The Porches Inn at MASS MoCA
I have to make a confession: I was skeptical about staying at Porches. Although I love visiting MASS MoCA, I could not imagine paying to spend a night in converted Victorian factory-workers’ houses across from the museum in order to wake up in North Adams instead of my own bed. But when I was invited to participate in the innovative Berkshire Creative “Bar Camp” last Friday night, I decided that I would give myself a break and book a room at Porches so I wouldn’t have to drive the long 65 miles home on Route 7 after dark. What I didn’t anticipate was that I was also giving myself a treat—a vacation in my own backyard.
Porches combines the personality and intimacy of a bed-and-breafast with all the comforts and professionalism of a world-class boutique hotel. When I checked in at 11 PM (after a delicious dinner at Cafe Latino and a pit stop at MASS MoCA’s mammoth Cuban Dance Party), I was welcomed by a bright-eyed desk clerk, who did not lose her cool when I reported that the key to my room did not work. “These are old fashioned locks and there’s one that’s a problem every night,” she said cheerfully as she came to my room and used the master key to get the door unstuck.
“Good Morning, North Adams!”
A visit to North Adams and MASS MoCA should be combined with a visit to Williamstown to see the The Clark, the Williams College Museum of Art, and, if the calendar is right, a play or two at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. If you’re not in a hurry, you can do an art walk of North Adams, but here are three iconic pitstops that give you a quick sense of the city’s quirky flavor.
Maya III by Jarvis Rockwell
73 Main Street; 413.664.8718
The son of Norman Rockwell built a 9 foot-pyramid covered with action figures at MASS MoCA in 2001, and now he has created a similar one, as well as expansive collages of ephemera, in his storefront studio. See Dan’s Diary for more pictures.
Widgitz
16 Eagle Street; 413.664.3262
Outsider artist Daniel Field has made a home for himself in a small storefront, where he displays his airplanes and trucks that he makes out of found objects.
Jack’s Hot Dog Stand
12 Eagle Street; 413.664.9006
Monday - Friday 10 AM - 7 PM; Saturday 10 AM - 4 PM; Closed Sunday
In business since 1917, you can feel the history of this once prosperous industrial city in this sliver of a lunch counter. The wondrous thing here are the hamburgers ($.95) and cheeseburgers ($1.20) made from fresh, handmade patties and served on warm rolls that come out of an ancient steamer built into the counter.
Porches has been very cleverly designed. It has a very long front porch with rocking chairs and porch swings that link the old buildings. Inside, the hallways have trompe l’oeil touches that suggest you are outside and they are decorated with kitschy paintings, signs and other Americana that make you smile. My room made me smile, too. Although it was painted a high-gloss salmon-color that I could never live with on a daily basis, it had an exuberance that was energizing. The sitting room was outfitted with a desk overlooking the museum, a comfortable sofa and chairs, and a kitschy mid-century lamp. The bed was dressed in pure white with a matelasse bedspread by Crispina with soft sheets and downy pillows. I couldn’t wait to crawl into bed.
But when I turned on the light in the bathroom, I changed my mind. The all-white bathroom was immaculate; I suddenly felt like I was on a spa vacation and I opted for a midnight bath with the mineral salts provided and a beer from the mini bar. (In the morning, I tried the separate stall shower with the rainwater head, which was heavenly.) The bathrobes and stack of white towels were to be expected, but I was struck by the fact that the hair dryer was not one of those awful contraptions glued to the wall; it was a normal hair dryer that was hung in a burlap bag from one of the Shaker pegs on the wall. I like a hotel that does not think you are going to steal the hair dryer.
Porches caters to business travelers as well as tourists, so there is a card you can fill out and hang on the door to have a room service breakfast delivered at a specified time. I wanted to sleep in, so instead of room service I opted for the buffet in the mustard-yellow breakfast room. There were linen napkins, stacks of the Boston Globe and New York Times (and WiFi for checking email), pain au chocolat, granola, hard boiled eggs, cereals, and excellent Barrington Coffee.
I was upset that I hadn’t followed my mother’s cardinal rule of travel: Always Pack a Bathing Suit. It turns out that Porches has an outdoor heated swimming pool and hot tub that are kept open around-the-clock 365 days a year. There is also a New Agey firepit surrounded by rustic furniture on the hillside above the swimming pool. 
It reminded me of a story I’d read about owner Nancy Fitzpatrick being a regular at Burning Man and seeing pictures of her funky Stockbridge house. I began to understand that Porches reflects Fitzpatrick’s multifaceted personality (she’s owns the Red Lion Inn and Country Curtains, and she serves on the board of MASS MoCA, the Boston Symphony and many other not-for-profits). Porches is artistic and sybaritic—an uncommonly urbane slice of the Berkshires.
The Porches Inn at MASS MoCA
231 River Street, North Adams; 413.664.0400
Rooms: $180 - $505 (but always ask about special promotions and packages)
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/05/09 at 10:49 AM • Permalink
Rock Hall: A Wall Streeter Transforms His Weekend House Into a Bed & Breakfast
Michael Somers is The Accidental Innkeeper. A few years ago, he and his wife, Stella Flame, decided that they’d had enough of the Hamptons where they had spent summers for decades, and they started looking for a weekend house in a mellower environment. They found a woebegone stone manor house (circa 1912) on 23 lush acres in Colebrook, CT (which is bordered by Sandisfield, MA to the north and by Norfolk, CT to the west), which was designed by Addison Mizner, who built many of the best houses in Palm Beach. They were enchanted by Rock Hall’s thick stone walls and gracious, high-ceilinged rooms, and they liked its proximity to Butternut where their daughter was skiing comptetively. “It’s one of only two house that Minzer designed in New England,” says Somers, a former high-powered Wall Street bond trader. “When Wall Street imploded, they no longer needed guys like me.” And thus, last fall, Somers moved out of Manhattan and transformed his beloved weekend house into a luxurious B&B. Instead of trading bonds for a living, he makes breakfast (below.)
His wife, who has been a shopkeeper in Manhattan and an antiques dealer in Bridgehampton, is an interior designer who has a custom centerpiece business called The Artfull Boxer. When Flame originally restored and decorated the house, she never thought that paying guests would be staying in it. She decided to change as little as possible and the house has an elegant restraint; you feel like you could be at one of the Gilded Age mansions in Lenox, MA. Flame fell in love with historic elements—a walk-in wood-lined refrigerator, a cloak room (now a game room with a view of the pool) a glass-and-stone mudroom that Ralph Lauren would envy. She left every architectural element intact. “It’s a hodgepodge,” she says. “There are Corinthian columns and Moorish elements but I wanted to stay true to Mizner’s aesthetic. We had to strip down the cofferred panelled walls in the living room because they had oxidized. They are natural chestnut which is rare because of the chestnut blight.”
The house feels dignified but comforable, quirky yet classy. “It is a real house,” says Somers, noting
that the only changes they made when turning it into a B&B was buying bathrobes and flat-screen TVs for the four guest suites. Flame left most of the original bathroom fixtures and windows, and she spent hundreds of hours looking at William Morris-style Arts & Crafts wallpapers, choosing exquisite patterns that make hanging paintings seem redundant. In the master suite (aka Chamber Two), they restored the original, wrap-a-round spray shower and stripped paint from the mirrored closet doors that open to create a three-way mirror. They made improvements like rebuilding the tennis court and adding a home theater, gym and game room on the third foor where there had been seven servants’ rooms once upon a time.
Now the couple and their 14-year-old daughter live in the servants’ quarters and paying guests stay in their old bedrooms. “I do miss Chamber Two,” says Flame with a good-hearted laugh. “But this has really been an exiciting opportunity to reinvent ourselves.” Local zoning regulations dictate that they must call themselves a B&B and not an inn, and they can only serve one meal a day. “It’s really a resort-style B&B,” says Flame, pointing to the 75 foot long swimming pool and synthetic-grass tennis court, which are shared by only 8 guests at a time. (Children under 12 are not allowed unless all four guest rooms have been rented by the same family or group.) Complimentary cocktails are served by the massive fireplace during the winter and by the pool over looking the gardens in the summer, and you feel like you could be visiting some very wealthy relatives. “I think this is one of the most wonderful places in the world,” says Somers. “All my friends thought so, too, when they didn’t have to pay to stay.”
Rock Hall
Colebrook, CT; 860.379.2230 or 917.696. 4955
Rooms: $240 - $320 a night
