The question lingered long enough for Susan and her husband, Tom, on one of their annual ski trips to Stowe, to return to Edson Hill several more times that weekend. The couple had learned of the inn on a lark, while flipping through a real estate circular at their regular après-ski bar. Susan, an interior designer based in Cape Cod, had done projects in the area – including a residence less than a mile from Edson Hill – but she had never seen, nor even heard about, this idyllic retreat. Still, for more than half a century it had operated as an inn – and, for the better part of that time, a wildly popular one at that. The manor house, originally built as a private estate in 1940 by a wealthy gold prospector from Rhode Island, opened as an exclusive guesthouse in 1951, just as Vermont’s ski scene entered its heyday. Surrounded by Nordic trails, it was the site of countless parties drawing an upper-crust clientele. In the ensuing years, the inn changed hands several times, parcelling out the original 550-acre estate and adding a handful of slope-roofed outbuildings along the way.
The corner dining room has spectacular views of the surrounding mountains. Susan’s tree-branch chandelier was a clever – and cost-free – creation: ‘We ventured into the woods and foraged for it,’ she says. ‘This April we’ll go back out and make another one.’
Jackie Caradonio
The next winter, back in Stowe for another ski season, Susan and Tom returned for another look at the old inn, still on the market. A year of renovation ideas had been percolating. ‘I already had the whole thing designed in my head,’ Susan says. It was time to ask the questions aloud. ‘We were skiing with my brothers-in-law, who are in finance and real estate development, and I posed it to them: What would it take?’ Numbers were crunched, calls were made, and soon, papers were signed. The family was all in: Susan would design. Tom and the brothers would manage the finances. ‘They gave me a budget and a deadline, and I was off and running,’ she says.
The inn’s tavern, which Susan updated with leather banquettes, reclaimed wood beams and archival photographs from Stowe’s heyday.
Jackie Caradonio
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