The Walnut Suite: Furnishings & Antiques

The second of three archival pages on the inn's grand suite. Historical record; nothing described here is for sale or for rent.

A Collected Room

The inn's whole philosophy — "splendid antiques blended with modern conveniences" — was easiest to see in the Walnut Suite. The room was furnished the way Victorian rooms actually were: accumulated rather than decorated. A marble-topped washstand stood in for a luggage bench; an armoire did the work of the closet the 1907 floor plan never bothered with; and the persian rugs that the inn's earliest webpages singled out softened a floor of old-growth fir.

The Detail Guests Remembered

Visitors' accounts of the suite returned to the same details: the height of the carved headboard, the weight of the panel doors with their original hardware, the wavering pane of an early window glass that bent the morning light. Lamps were period brass or painted china; the reading chairs were upholstered pieces a household of 1910 would have recognized. Modern intrusions — cable television, a telephone, wireless internet, a small refrigerator — were tucked into the room's edges, present but unargumentative, as the amenities record describes.

Living With Antiques

An inn furnished this way carries real obligations, which explains house rules that could otherwise read as fussy: no smoking or vaping anywhere indoors, no pets in the later years, and a gentle steering of small children away from the upper floors. The furnishings were not reproductions, and the innkeepers were frank that they were caretakers first and hosts second. It is the reason the house's interior survived its hospitality career so completely — and the reason this archive can describe it in the present tense with only a little license.

Continue to architecture and light in the Walnut Suite, return to the suite overview, or see all five rooms.