The Inn’s restaurant, the Feathers, which has a menu “rooted in early-American and traditional country cookery,” developed by Molly Levine, the chef-owner of Westerly Canteen.
Art: GRECODECO
The upscale upstate hotel has come to be a blandly, luxuriously uniform thing — interchangeable linens, light fixtures, and décor; an austere early American aesthetic with a dash of Scandinavian minimalism. Against this landscape, Audrey Gelman’s Six Bells country inn in the Hudson Valley is decidedly maximalist. All 11 guest rooms will have individual names, design schemes, and backstories, which have yet to be revealed, but one assumes they will have something to do with the characters in the fictional English village of Barrow’s Green that Gelman created when she launched her Six Bells shop on Court Street in Brooklyn. “Something that’s very unexplored is the space between luxury hospitality and theme hospitality,” Gelman told The Wall Street Journal in June. Prepare to explore.
The Lamplight has a king bed box and archival wallpaper.
Art: GRECODECO
New renderings of the interiors, done by Greco Deco (a design firm that also did the Ned in London), show something that shares a design sensibility with Gelman’s store and her former upstate compound, which itself was a staging ground for much of what sold in the shop — but somehow more. “The design process started with dozens of out-of-print coffee-table books about country- and folk-art design,” Gelman wrote in an email. “We used interior-design references, but also movie stills, pages from old children’s books, and historical documents from townscapes and villages.” She also, as she told the Journal, made dollhouselike miniatures of the rooms to map out the hotel’s ethos.
The rooms feature ornate beds and detailed wall coverings. The Innkeepers suite also has a bed box. Very Wuthering Heights!
Art: GRECODECO
Room names of note: the Innkeepers suite (a king bed, a twin bed box, green and burgundy and hand-painted florals), Lamplight (a king bed box, writing desk, patterned wallpaper, borders, elaborate window dressings), and the Ribbon (a king bed with a kind of tapestry hood, lounge seating). There are bed boxes (that is, enclosed beds built into cabinet-like structures), canopy beds, ruffles, archival wallpaper, elaborate curtains, pine cladding. The website, which just launched for booking (rooms are available beginning June 1, at rates starting around $400 a night), speaks of “a color palette somewhere between sweet pastels and melancholia.”
The Ribbon, which has a partial canopy bed and a seating area. The décor is a marriage of American, British, and Alpine folk design, according to Gelman.
Art: GRECODECO
Guests who are taken with the aesthetic of their rooms will be able to buy sheets, pillows, quilts, plates, lamps, platters, and antiques, but, Gelman says, not the bed frames or bed boxes (at least not yet). But isn’t it inconvenient, we wondered, to have to replace such unique décor? (This kind of headache is why, we assume, the rooms at places like the Waldorf Astoria all kind of look the same.) But that’s part of the interactive inn business model as well, she says: “Antique trips are a constant part of sourcing for both the store and hotel, so there will always be new things to fill up empty spaces on the shelves.”
A rear view of the tavern.
Art: GRECODECO
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