The Hotel that Built me: The Country Club Inn.

I grew up in an Inn. The Country Club Inn. It was the kind of childhood you only read about in novels. Days filled with running around the well-kept grounds, whacking croquet balls aimlessly, making forts from gadgets in the repairatourium and always, always wishing there would be no guests in the pool. Our little unheated swimming playground rarely did. Winter had its joys too, more forts in the snowbanks and always trying to face the fear of the big sledding hill on hole 9. I surely don’t take those adolescent days for granted, as the totality of the Inn experience lives in all the shapes of me. 

But let’s go back even further, to the beginning of the Country Club Inn in Rangeley, Maine. 

Picture this: it’s 1920. There are six gentlemen, all millionaires & investors, with a desire to have their own private lodge, as if inspired by Sir Theodore Roosevelt himself—Wild, life. I like to imagine that it was a time, fresh out of the war and inspired minds focused on hospitality, and at that time in Rangeley, it was all for the taking. These gentlemen would build this lodge on top of a hill with panoramic views of mountains and lakes. They’d add two dueling fieldstone fire places defined by the cathedral ceilings in the living quarters and a lounge for drinking away their city sorrows. Plus, add in a 9-hole golf course for a little play after the day’s hunt. Those boys found absolute beauty and prosperity. It was private, it was elite, and it was a club. What noble Northerner doesn’t see that as the dream? They cultivated a vision of opulence and pleasure and with just enough money to make it happen. 

It wasn’t until the 1950s that they sold it, and it became an Inn. There were guest rooms added on, creating twenty in total, and the golf course was sold off to become a public 18-hole course. Business. And then that’s where my family comes in—taking care of business. My grandfather purchased the Inn in 1975,  and the rest is history.  A successful generational model was built on welcoming outsiders for comfort, laughs, good food and spirits, wet and dry. He created a warm, casual luxury for the people, a hospitable escape from the metropolis. You can feel the history bleed through the walls. My parents eventually took over the business, keeping up a level of generous and gracious hospitality.

My mother followed in her father’s footsteps of being the social staple. In different eras,  they’d each take their beer to the dining room and choose a table for the evening to sit and chat with. People came year after year, just to see my mother and be in her positive presence. And others came repeatedly to eat my father’s sensetional food. I’m completely biased, but there isn’t and will never be a better or more consistently great chef in the world than my dad. I’ll be searching the globe trying to find them.  Every bit of this place shaped who I am, from my endless consideration and service to the functioning alcoholic that has lingered in me.  I wouldn’t trade my traits for any.