A house since 1926 · an inn since 2012
Our story
Alma and her brother bought a boarded-up four-flat on 61st Street in 2011 and spent a year finding out what a 1926 building hides. It opened with six rooms and now has fifteen. That is the whole story, and the rest of this page is the part that is actually useful.
What the building was
A single family house until the nineteen-fifties, then cut into four apartments, then empty for most of a decade. The staircase, the banister, the encaustic tiles in the hall and the fireplace surround in the parlour are original. Almost nothing else is.
Opening it as an inn meant putting a bathroom into every room, which in a house of this age means losing floor area in fifteen places. That is why the Snug is a hundred and thirty square feet and why the Courtyard Twins have a shower over the bath: the honest version of "characterful" is "we fitted what would fit".
What we deliberately did not do
We did not put a television in any room, because the wi-fi is good and everybody already has a screen they prefer. We did not open a restaurant, because a fifteen-room house cannot run one properly and running one badly is worse than not having one. We did not put in a lift, because it would have cost two of the fifteen rooms and the ground-floor room we made step-free instead does more good.
Each of those is a decision with a cost, and each is written up on the page about what this inn does not have rather than left out of the story.
What the building actually contains
- Fifteen rooms across six types, on three floors of a 1926 brick house
- A breakfast room seating twenty-four, and breakfast included in every rate
- A walled garden of about ninety feet with a terrace, and a fire bowl from October
- Two rooms that can be booked for a private gathering: the Garden Room for twenty-four seated, the Long Room for forty standing
- A front parlour with a working fireplace, open to guests all day
- One step-free ground-floor room and a step-free entrance from the garden side
- No lift, no car park, no gym, no pool, no restaurant and no room service
How it is run
Nine people, five of them full time. Somebody is on the desk from seven in the morning until ten at night and nobody is on it after that, which is the most consequential fact about staying here and has its own page. Alma cooks the Sunday breakfast. Everybody who works here has been in all fifteen rooms this week, which is why the answer to "which room is quietest" is a real answer rather than a shrug.
The thing we are actually trying to do
Be the small property that tells you the truth before you book. Every page on this website that looks like a disclaimer — the stairs, the noise, the desk, the rate arithmetic, what a photograph does not show — is there because we would rather lose a booking than have somebody arrive to a building that is not what they were sold.
That is not modesty. A guest who booked the Attic Double knowing it is two flights up under a sloping ceiling comes back; a guest who found that out at nine at night with a suitcase does not, and tells people.
The things this inn does not have. No restaurant, no room service, no lift, no car park, no gym and no pool. The page that lists what we do not have exists so that nobody discovers one of them on arrival.
Fifteen rooms · breakfast included · no lift
Check availability
Give the form the night you arrive, the morning you leave and how many of you there are. It checks every night of the range rather than the first one, prices each night on its own and shows you the arithmetic before you type a name. If a night in the middle is full it says so and offers you the ranges nearby that do work.