Lessons on hospitality and place from the Inn at Little Washington

About a year ago, Stephen and I went to the Inn at Little Washington for Southern Lady. We pulled into a small crossroads of a town, just east of the Shenandoah Valley, and I didn’t quite know what to expect. I had heard stories of lavish interiors and extraordinary food. The town itself, however, gave the impression of quaint, yet idyllic Americana. A small downtown, a kind of village, really, with beautifully manicured window boxes and gardens, and board-and-batten exteriors in stately greens, blues, and reds—colorful, yes, but not overbearing. As we got ourselves situated, the chef and proprietor himself, Patrick O’Connell, helped get our bags into our room. 

Stepping inside, the interiors dripped with an unexpected degree of luxury. Beautifully patterned fabrics lined the walls and draped in billows from the ceilings. Monkeys danced in the bar room wallpaper—indicative of a whimsical playfulness at work throughout the place. In working on the story about this wonderfully peculiar locale, I got an unexpected lesson on the meaning of place and how valuable it is to feel at peace with your surroundings and then share that with others.

O’Connell first came to this part of Virginia as a child. His family would go on road trips from D.C. to the Shenandoah Valley, and Washington (known as “Little Washington” to differentiate it from the busy capitol) fashioned itself as a roadside stop. Its two main streets were peppered with service stations. In fact, O’Connell’s well-appointed inn was previously a tire shop and gas station—something hard to imagine today. 

The way O’Connell explains it, this little town—the first place in the United States named after our first president—held special meaning for him. It became a part of him, and, in turn, he left an indelible mark on it. 

“My sense is that when you find your ideal ‘spot,’ everything falls into place,” he told me. “You know you’ve found it because you feel centered, secure and in harmony.”

O’Connell and Little Washington became two parts of a whole. He started with the restaurant in the former service station, always envisioning expanding to create a larger inn. He then added he surrounding pasture land, and shops down the main street. Last year, they created a parsonage across the street from main inn. 

For O’Connell, making the Inn at Little Washington meant celebrating the best that the area has to offer, and offering it to others as an immersive experience.

“Amazingly, it’s still possible here to create your own visual landscape by screening out anything you don’t want to look at and controlling your views and vistas,” he said. “Through imaginative landscape planning, it’s possible to design your own idealized universe in miniature.” 

Not everyone has the kind of all-encompassing vision that O’Connell possessed when he embarked on the creation of his inn—an endeavor that has taken nearly 40 years. From the intricate flavors of his food to the decorative details of the interiors, each piece speaks to an imagination paired with great ingenuity. 

The experience also speaks to the power of place. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues that a place comes into being through experience and familiarity. It is deeply personal. Yet those gifted in hospitality have the ability to offer their experiences to others, and craft a meaningful place to the uninitiated. Not everyone can stand among the rolling hills of Virginia and see the possibilities realized at the Inn at Little Washington. Yet the power of one person’s especially strong understanding of that area can make a special experience available to guests. 

I have no ambition to own an inn or open a restaurant. Hearing O’Connell’s thoughts on the power of place and seeing his ability to present his enjoyment of the area to travelers, however, does inspire me let an air of hospitality speak through the places I have the ability to create.

Stephen and I bought a home just before Christmas last year, and we have since set out to make it our own. More than that, though, I am learning from the South’s sanctuaries of hospitality, that in crafting a place for us, I also have the opportunity to invite others in to enjoy the love and happiness that allowed us to make a home in the first place. 

For more on the Inn at Little Washington, see the story in Travel South, Southern Lady's new travel special edition. 

Travel Experience: The Intimacy of the Family Vacation

Maybe we had reached step 200 when a middle-aged woman came waddling down the narrow staircase with her pre-teen daughter and kindly told us, "It's 294 steps." I kept repeating the number in my head. We were almost, kind of, almost there. My heart raced a little faster, breaths came a little harder with each ascending step. We were hoofing our way to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument — our penultimate stop along Boston's Freedom Trail. With my sister and brother-in-law ahead of us, Stephen and I continued our progress, not wanting to miss the possibility of an outstanding view of the city. 

The Bunker Hill Monument during the Bunker Hill Day celebrations in Charlestown, Mass. sometime between 1890 and 1901. Image from Wikimedia.

For those less familiar, the Freedom Trail literally makes a 2.5-mile red line through the historic sites of Beantown's colonial past. Sometimes it's painted on asphalt, sometimes it's a narrow, brick-lined path, but we followed almost every step of it, starting in the Common, maneuvering past the State House and through at least two historic burial grounds. We got lunch at Quincy Market behind Faneuil Hall, toured Paul Revere's house, and saw the church where the lanterns hung declaring the British arrival by sea. After the hike up the obelisk at Bunker Hill, things wrapped up with an exploration of the USS Constitution. While two and a half miles doesn't sound especially long, this footpath also marked the final day of our family vacation in Boston. On this last day before we drove down to New Jersey for my graduation from Rutgers there was a sense that we needed to make the most of every possible moment and leave no stone unturned, even if it was raining most of the time. 

In addition to my parents and sister, this trip marked the first family vacation to include two new family members — my brother-in-law Joel and husband Stephen. (Unfortunately, my brother had to be in Colorado for a wedding, so we were down a man.) When I was thinking about our time in Boston as a travel experience, though, it occurred to me that family vacations and family-oriented travel don't often make it into our reflections on meaningful travel. Those narratives are usually occupied by the individual adventurer who wanders into some uncertain yet exciting terrain. The family politics of where to go for lunch, how to get there, and who gets to set the temperature on the thermostat — not to mention the possibility of childhood rivalries rearing their ugly heads — don't create a sense of wanderlust for the reader or the writer. We might love to laugh at Clark Griswold and his travel disasters behind the wheel of the family station wagon, but not too many would pay to ride along. For most of us, though, these are our travel stories. Saving for that holiday trip to see grandparents, making sure we have a little emergency fund stashed away in case a sibling's baby comes early or there's a complication with a loved one's surgery — these are the real, everyday, unglamorous travel experiences that comprise so many lives. 

While family travel moments don't always have the flash and polish that we see on glossy magazine pages, they carry that basic element that makes travel meaningful in all its varied forms. Travel breaks our routines, forces us to see the world in a new way, makes us reconsider how we understand home and what we love about it. If we're honest with ourselves, spending time with family can have the same effect. Traveling with family merges two boundary-breaking experiences — creating a corporate experience that hopefully draws us closer together because we've tasted the same new foods, seen the same sites, laughed about them, and maybe whined a little too. While doing all that, we were in the company of the people who know the ins and outs of some of our deepest personal moments. The family vacation could be among our most intimate shared life experiences.

After completing our ascent at Bunker Hill, more than the view, I remember the inescapable soreness we each felt in our legs for several days afterward. As Joel put it, there was a "ball of pain" encased in each calf. Maybe our shared build up of lactic acid doesn't make for an ideal travel story, but it's an important family story. One where a few years from now we'll remember and laugh about how painful it was to walk down even a few steps the next day, and the day after that. Those of us who love to travel get hooked on how the experience of a new place adds another facet to our sense of being human. Just as travel makes the person, the vacation — for better or worse — helps make the family. We didn't each see the Freedom Trail in the same way. But trek through Boston for the better part of day, make it rainy, a little cold and physically taxing, and you have six people who emerge with a deeper sense of who they are as a single entity, who we are as a family.