Serenbe Style and Soul

with Marie Nygren

Friday

7

August 2015

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Inns and Outs: How Nine New Rooms Turned Our Home Into A Hotel

Written by , Posted in Miscellaneous

Steve, the girls and I moved out of what is now the Inn at Serenbe in December of 2005. It started as a farmhouse, evolved into our home for 11 years, transitioned into a bed and breakfast and became, until a few weeks ago, a 19-room inn where people come from all over the world to stay and explore our community.

Over the past five years, demand and desire led to conversations about adding new rooms. Those talks turned into plans and dirt turned into nine additional rooms that opened late last month.

They’ve changed the whole dynamic of our sweet little Inn. I look around at all the housekeepers scurrying about and think, wow, we really are a hotel now. With upwards of 80 employees, it’s come so far beyond what started with Steve and I back in 1996.

Originally Quinn and I tackled the décor but managing everything from window treatments to Kleenex boxes quickly overwhelmed us. Quinn has the dubious honor of being liaison between contractors, decorators, Garnie (who’s in charge of the Inn), Steve and I. I’d mention some decision I’d made about marble bathrooms and she’d say, “Mother, did you allot for it in the budget? And I’d look at her like she’d descended from another planet. “Mother,” she’d say again, quite sternly. “We have to allot for it in the budget.”

One day I visited with longtime Atlanta designer Stan Topol, a dear friend who designed many of Steve’s restaurants in Atlanta and The Hil at Serenbe. On the way back, I texted Garnie and Steve: Why haven’t we called Uncle Stanley to help us? For Quinn and I, it’s a major undertaking. To him it’s old hat.

Stan came on board, waved his wand around and made magic. Then legendary landscape designer Ryan Gainey, who designed the original gardens when it was our home, joined on to do the garden. And just like that, we have 10,000 feet of new space, including a conference room that seats 110 for dinner and 170 theater-style.

View More: http://jashley.pass.us/serenbe-inn

This project has been our baby for so long. And the night before we opened it to the public, we stayed there with our babies—the first time we’d slept there together since we left 10 years ago. We toasted to their future with Champagne—the three girls will eventually own it together.

Visitors come and see soft beds and shiny new appliances. I look around and see my family’s past and my daughters’ future.

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