Mohonk Mountain House

In 1869 Albert Smiley, a Quaker schoolmaster from Providence, paid $28,000 for 280 acres on the Shawangunk Ridge with a ten-room tavern beside a glacial lake. Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York grew from that tavern into a Victorian castle a quarter of a mile long, and the Smiley family still owns and runs it.

History

Albert's twin brother Alfred found the site on a picnic; Albert bought it and opened for guests the same summer. The brothers ran the house on Quaker lines, with no bar and no card-playing, and families from Philadelphia and New York came back year after year. Albert Smiley also used the place for politics. The Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the Indian met here from 1883, and the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration from 1895 until 1916 brought diplomats and jurists to the porch every spring; Smiley sat on the federal Board of Indian Commissioners for decades.

The building was never designed as one thing. Wings went on in stages between 1879 and 1910, in timber and then in stone, with Napoleon LeBrun and Sons and James E. Ware among the architects. The Smileys gave the surrounding ridge to a trust in 1963 that became the Mohonk Preserve, and the house itself was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986. A spa wing opened in 2005. The fifth and sixth generations of the family run the company.

Architecture and design

Seen across the lake the house is a jumble of towers, gables, turrets and porches in grey stone and dark timber, with the cliffs of the Gunks behind. Inside, the long corridors keep their Victorian furniture, fireplaces and bentwood rockers, and the Parlor, the main sitting room, has the original carved woodwork and lake windows. More than a hundred rustic wooden summerhouses, built by the hotel's own carpenters, stand on rock outcrops along the carriage roads, and the Albert K. Smiley Memorial Tower, finished in 1923 on Sky Top, is the landmark of the ridge.

Rooms and suites

Rooms vary with the age of their wing. Many have a working fireplace and a balcony over the lake or the gardens; the tower rooms are the most asked for. The rate is Full American Plan: breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea with the house's cookies are included, as are most activities. Most rooms have no television, by policy.

Dining

The main dining room seats the whole house, in several rooms with lake views, and has done since the nineteenth century, from a kitchen that works with Hudson Valley farms. A more casual restaurant and a bar were later additions. The afternoon tea and cookies in the Lake Lounge are the ritual guests mention first.

Wellness

The 2005 spa wing, built in stone to match the old house, has a heated indoor pool under a solarium, an outdoor heated mineral pool, treatment rooms and a fitness room. Outside is the real wellness programme: 85 miles of trails and carriage roads, rock scrambles through the Labyrinth and the Lemon Squeeze to Sky Top, swimming and boating on the lake in summer, skating and cross-country skiing in winter.

Weddings and events

Mohonk has hosted conferences since 1883 and weddings for almost as long. Ceremonies take place in the gardens, on the lake porches or at the summerhouses, with dinner in the private dining rooms; the house can be taken over whole for larger gatherings. Meeting rooms handle corporate retreats, which benefit from the absence of anywhere else to go.

Location

The house is 90 miles north of Manhattan on the Shawangunk Ridge above New Paltz, in Ulster County. Drivers take the New York State Thruway to exit 18; by rail, Metro-North and Amtrak reach Poughkeepsie across the Hudson, 30 minutes away by taxi. Stewart International Airport at Newburgh is the closest airport, with the New York City airports about two hours away. For a luxury hotel in the Hudson Valley it is the oldest and the largest, and the only one with its own mountain.