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Five Favorite New England Inns

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A Sense of Harmony

Guest House at Field Farm
554 Sloan Road
Williamstown, MA
413-458-3135
thetrustees.org/field-farm/

In Williamstown, Massachusetts, first impressions of the flat-roofed Guest House at Field Farm are underwhelming. Then you step through the front door and see Mount Greylock. The high, wide-shouldered mountain is framed in multiple picture windows, and, instead of competing, the uncluttered rooms -- furnished in gleaming 1950s chrome, solid colors, and glowing wood -- complement the view.

"In a lot of places you're not allowed to sit in anything by these designers," innkeeper Ole Retlev tells me, waving at chairs by Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner. The fluid glass-topped coffee table is by Isamu Noguchi, the couch by Vladimir Kagan, and that's an original Eames chair.

This "modernist" house, with its many windows and decks, heated floors, and recessed lighting, was designed in 1948 by Edwin Goodell Jr. as a home for Lawrence Bloedel and his wife, Eleanor. A 1923 Williams College graduate and heir to a Pacific Northwest lumber fortune, Bloedel lived here quietly, devoting himself to collecting American art, including works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe, and Marsden Hartley, and to designing and building much of the furniture in his house.

Lawrence Bloedel died in 1976; upon Eleanor's death in 1984, their art collection was divided between New York's Whitney Museum and the Williams College Museum of Art, which in addition acquired the sculptures positioned around the house and along the path to the swimming pool. Williams College also owns some of the paintings hanging in this house and in "The Folly," a modernist glass-and-shingle masterpiece (formerly a guesthouse) designed by Ulrich Franzen, by the pond.

Field Farm was bequeathed to the Trustees of Reservations, a nonprofit conservation group whose mission is to preserve parcels of land "which possess uncommon beauty and more than refreshing power," much as an art museum holds pictures. Now 316 acres, the Field Farm reservation includes fields and meadows, woods, marshland, and an unusual area in which streams disappear into limestone caves. Its four miles of walking trails are open to the public.

The initial plan was to raze the house. Luckily David and Judy Loomis, who had meticulously restored Williamstown's 18th-century River Bend Farm as a bed-and-breakfast, suggested a similar use for Field Farm. And now that the 1950s are historic, the era's architecture and craftsmanship command new respect. Guests at Field Farm understand why. The five bedrooms, some with fireplaces and decks, are furnished with the same care and detail as are the common spaces. There's a sense of harmony, inside and out.

The Best View Around

The Claremont Hotel
22 Claremont Road
Southwest Harbor, ME
800-244-5036
theclaremonthotel.com

The Claremont Hotel, Mount Desert's oldest inn, possesses the grace but not the size or formality of a grand hotel -- and the Maine island's best view.

Walking into the comfortably sized lobby, you pour a glass of ice water, ease into a wing chair by the fire or a rocker on the porch, and feel at home. Upstairs the original 35 second- and third-floor guestrooms have been reduced to 24, all with closets and baths, furnished with refinished original pieces and graceful reproductions. Rooms overlooking the tennis court cost less that those with views across the water to Acadia's rounded mountains.