A Boutique Hotel is Bringing Guests a Luxury Stay in Lenox
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| The owners held a ribbon cutting. |
LENOX, Mass. — A new Inn is bringing a boutique-style stay for visitors and locals to enjoy.
Owners, Sullivan Capital LLC, purchased the property, located on 135 Main Street, in 2024. After a year or renovations, Garden Gables Inn is open for business.
"Garden Gables started off as one of the many Berkshire cottages, 1790 was the date on that, and it's always operated as an inn," said Hospitality Manager Yvonne Walton. "It's just a great gathering place and relaxation spot for people to come and get the feel of Lenox, and just slow down and enjoy the nature and the surrounding area...get culture and art and see some great concerts. I think it'll be a wonderful place, definitely does more of the upper-scale hospitality."
Owners Niko Giallouis and Eric Sullivan bought the property from the former owner. Sullivan had his eye on Lenox since attending a wedding almost 10 years ago.
"I came to a wedding in Lenox, probably six or seven years ago. Personally, just kind of fell in love with the area, and I guess that's kind of how it got on my radar. So you know from that perspective, as we got into the hotel business out towards an area, it was a place I was kind of monitoring and waiting for the right property to show up."
After purchasing the two underwent a full renovation, a project that cost around $1.5 million. The building, first built in 1780, required some TLC. Sullivan's wife, Jessica, who owns Jessica Sullivan Design, designed the inn.
Sullivan said they installed a new roof, repainted everything, renovated the bathrooms, installed new floors, a new HVAC system, and new plumbing.
"We really touched everything from the outside...I mean, all the aesthetics and layouts changed a bit," he said. "As I said, put about a million and a half into it. All new furniture, fixtures, everything. The design's completely different. It wasn't a full gut, but it was a heavy, heavy renovation."
The two like to collaborate with local businesses, and they make a point to direct visitors to local restaurants, businesses, and attractions.
"If guests are asking for recommendations, our customer service team, our guest services team, will relay that kind of information. Even if we can call and make a reservation for somebody, happy to do it," he said. "We aren't doing breakfast, but what we do is we have partnerships with a lot of the breakfast places downtown. We actually purchase a gift certificates for each person each day, so that they can use that to go downtown."
Sullivan hopes that guests don't see their inn as just a place to sleep and dump their bags, but make it an experience for anyone who stays.
"We really focus on kind of the experience side of things, so again, we want to give you the best experience you can have here...and we want that not just to be the place you put your bag and go do things. It's important to think of everything," he said.
Sullivan said partnerships are important to their business and are a way to connect with locals.
"The local partnerships, I can't stress that enough, because no matter how much and how great the room is, people are still going to want to go do other things," he said. "So, I think it just benefits everybody if we're all working together and so forth, and supporting the community, being neighborly too, because we are surrounded by residential homes...But we really try to put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, a lot of love into the building, all the details, really care about the senses," Sullivan said.
The Inn's check-in and reservations are completely online. When guests arrive, all they have to do is check in online and receive their code that they will use to enter their room. Sullivan hopes this helps create less stress for guests and gets them to their room as fast as possible, especially after a long trip.
The Inn also does not have a max stay limit, letting people stay as long as they would like.
"The idea for it originally really was you go to some of these hotels, and sometimes it can be a long line, and you're waiting 30 minutes to check in," he said. "Like that, just can kind of change your mood, and I just said, if you show up in a great mood, my job is to keep you in that mood or make it better."
The inn also has a pool. Although there are no plans for it at the time, it was cited as the biggest concrete pool in the county. Sullivan said that currently, the main focus is to add 10 more rooms to their 16.
Currently, they have rooms booked, but still have openings in the summer. Sullivan encourages guests to come and visit more than once, experiencing a different room each time, with the same luxury experience.
"Every room is different, so you know if somebody was coming back more than once, try a different room, right? The experience overall should be the same, but again, a lot of hotels are copy-paste. I think that's what's kind of nice with the properties that we do. They are a little bit quirky buildings that probably weren't originally built to be a hotel, and were converted. So it just creates a different type of experience overall," he said.
Tags: new business, hotels, renovation,
