Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

No car has ever pulled up to the porch of Grand Hotel Mackinac Island, because the island banned motor vehicles in 1898 and the hotel opened eleven years earlier. Guests arrive as they did on 10 July 1887, by ferry across the Straits of Mackinac and then by horse-drawn carriage up the hill from the harbour. The hotel was built by railway and steamship interests, the Michigan Central Railroad, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad and the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Company, to give their passengers a reason to travel north in summer.

History

Charles W. Caskey of Harbor Springs put the building up in a single construction season to a design credited to George D. Mason of Detroit. Mark Twain lectured in the casino building in 1895. W. Stewart Woodfill, who had started at the front desk in 1919, bought the hotel in 1933 and ran it through the Depression and the war; his nephew R.D. Musser took over in 1960, and the Musser family owned the hotel until its sale to KSL Capital Partners in 2019. Esther Williams swam in the pool for the 1947 film This Time for Keeps, and the pool carries her name. In 1980 Somewhere in Time, with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, was filmed in the hotel and its grounds; fans of the film gather here for a weekend every October. The hotel was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

Architecture and design

The hotel is a wooden Queen Anne building of white clapboard with a green roof, and the front porch, 660 feet long and lined with rocking chairs and red geraniums, is said to be the longest in the world. The interiors were the work of Carleton Varney of Dorothy Draper & Company from 1976 until his death in 2022: saturated greens, pinks and yellows, striped wallpapers, floral carpets and painted furniture, all deliberately out of step with hotel fashion. The Parlor on the main floor, with its view through the porch columns to the Straits and the Mackinac Bridge, is the hotel's living room.

Rooms and suites

There are 388 rooms and no two are decorated alike. Named suites on the upper floors honour former First Ladies, who chose fabrics and colours for the rooms that carry their names, and the Cupola Suites sit under the roofline with the widest views of the water. Rooms are priced with breakfast and dinner included, in the manner of the old resort hotels.

Dining

Dinner in the Main Dining Room is five courses, served to several hundred guests a night by a staff drawn from around the world, and after 6.30 pm the hotel's dress code applies in all public areas: jackets and ties for men, dresses, skirts or trouser suits for women. The Grand Luncheon Buffet at midday is open to day visitors. Elsewhere on the grounds are Woods, a Bavarian-style restaurant with a duckpin bowling alley, the Jockey Club at the Grand Stand beside the golf course, the Gate House on Cadotte Avenue and the Cupola Bar on the top floor, which looks over the Straits at sunset.

Wellness

The Esther Williams Swimming Pool, 220 feet long, sits below the porch in the lawns. Astor's Salon & Spa occupies rooms in the hotel. The Jewel, the hotel's 18-hole golf course, is split in two: the Grand nine in front of the hotel dates from 1901, and the Woods nine lies a carriage ride away inland, with the hotel's horses carrying players between them. There are tennis courts, bicycles for the island's eight-mile shoreline road and carriage tours.

Weddings and events

Weddings take place on the Tea Garden lawn below the porch, with the Straits behind the couple, and receptions in the hotel's ballrooms and dining rooms. The hotel also hosts conferences and association meetings through its season, with the ferries and carriages handling group arrivals. It closes from late October to early May.

Location

Mackinac Island lies in the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. Ferries from Mackinaw City and St. Ignace take 15 to 20 minutes; the hotel's carriages meet them at the dock. Pellston Regional Airport on the mainland is about 20 minutes from the Mackinaw City ferries, and a small airstrip on the island takes private aircraft. The hotel stands above the harbour on the island's west side, a short carriage ride from the shops of Main Street. It is the luxury hotel in Michigan that guests reach by horse.