Issues → May/June 2008 → Home & Garden →

Concord, MA: Hawthorne Inn

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To successfully live where you work for 30 years, says Marilyn, "you have to have balance in life." She and Gregory spend lots of time with guests at check-in and breakfast, but evenings are reserved for family and friends. Concord is the perfect place for a quality lifestyle and hospitality. It's home to one of the nation's best public school systems; it's an exceptionally active community; and Boston is close. Guests enjoy the town's history, literary events, shops and restaurants, canoe rides, visits to their kids at the town's two prep schools and dozens of area colleges, and tours of sites such as Walden Pond and the Emerson house. With so much to do, people keep coming back. Gregory and Marilyn tell aspiring innkeepers that metropolitan areas are best for year-round B&Bs.

They also recommend trusting your own taste. "Many inns are decorated with a theme, or reflect a time period," says Gregory. "That's never been our way. If we like it, we buy it." They love Japanese ukiyo-e prints, so some four dozen decorate the building's 18 rooms. They pair the traditional (a Norman Rockwell artist's proof) with the unexpected (a Haitian voodoo mask), and it works. Everything from whimsical lamps to a Sheraton/Empire desk, an Eastlake platform rocker to a 17th-century Persian helmet, keeps company at this inn.

"But no matter how nice the property," says Gregory, "if the people who run it are cold, it's not homey." That's why in addition to amenities such as off-street parking, the Hawthorne also offers comforts such as "advice, career counseling, dog adoption services, travel information, tips for the newly married (or soon-to-be), weather forecasts, driving alerts, succor, support, and humor at no extra charge." And that's why Marilyn and Gregory might get a card in the mail years after a guest has stayed there, just to say he was remembering them and wondering how they're doing.

The Detail: Showcase Closets

Because Gregory and Marilyn didn't want to keep their treasures hidden in a drawer, or collecting dust on an open shelf where they could get broken, they incorporated an attractive solution throughout the inn: showcase closets. In the dining room, Gregory cut the center wood panel out of the door of a closet that had served as a phone booth (years before telephones were installed in the guestrooms). He inserted a piece of beveled glass into the door, and then installed decorative lighting in the closet space to create a night-light effect. He put in glass shelves, arranged the family's fun collection of salt and pepper shakers, and, voilà, a colorful shadowbox.

Across the dining room is another display case in an old coat closet, where Gregory installed leaded glass doors above and drawers below. These shelves, holding pre-Columbian and original sculpture, create a mini-museum of curiosities. And in the family kitchen, an old dumbwaiter became a display cabinet for their Dedham pottery creche set and glassware collection, including cranberry glass, Queen Lace crystal, and Czech cut glass. It brightens the whole room.

Hints from the Hawthorne

Beds: Top-of-the-line Stearns & Foster mattresses with pillowtops and high-quality duvets. Sheets are all-cotton with 300-400 thread count. Each room has a mixture of four pillows (feather, fiberfill, hard, and soft). To cover a four-poster canopy bed, Gregory and Marilyn adapted an antique pulled-and-tatted linen tablecloth, perfectly sized and patterned to cover the posts with an elegant drop.