The Greenbrier

In 1778 the first visitors came to take the sulphur waters in the Allegheny Mountains, and The Greenbrier, the resort at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, has received guests since then. The present hotel was built by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1913 and redecorated after the war by Dorothy Draper, whose colours still define it. Beneath its West Virginia wing lies the bunker built in secret for the United States Congress in the Cold War.

History

The springs drew Virginia planters in the late eighteenth century, and by the 1830s cottages had been built around them for summer society. The Old White Hotel opened in 1858, and the resort became the summer home of Southern politics; after the Civil War Robert E. Lee spent several summers here. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway bought the property in 1910 and opened the Greenbrier Hotel in 1913 beside the Old White, which was demolished in 1922.

In December 1941 the State Department used the hotel to intern German, Italian and Japanese diplomats before their exchange. The Army then bought it and ran it as Ashford General Hospital until 1946. The railway bought it back and hired Dorothy Draper to redecorate every room, reopening in 1948 with a party that marked the hotel's return to society. Between 1958 and 1961 the government built a fallout shelter for Congress beneath the new West Virginia wing, known as Project Greek Island, which remained secret until the Washington Post disclosed it in 1992. It was decommissioned in 1995 and is now open for tours. CSX, the railway's successor, sold the resort in 2009 to Jim Justice, a coal operator who later became governor of the state, and a casino opened in 2010.

Architecture and design

The hotel is a white neoclassical building of brick and stucco with a columned portico, extended in wings over a century so that its corridors run for hundreds of metres. Dorothy Draper's interiors, applied in 1948 and maintained since by her successor Carleton Varney, are the point: black-and-white marble floors, rhododendron chintz, scarlet and emerald walls, striped wallpapers and oversized plaster mouldings. The style was named Romance and Rhododendrons, after the state flower, and the resort has refused to tone it down.

Rooms and suites

The resort has about 710 rooms, suites and guest houses, from rooms in the main building to the estate homes and cottages on the grounds, including the Springhouse Row cottages that predate the hotel. It is the largest luxury hotel in West Virginia by a wide margin.

Dining

The Main Dining Room, with its chandeliers and Draper palette, serves dinner in the formal tradition of the resort. Draper's Cafe, the Forum, Prime 44 West, named after Jerry West, and In-Fusion cover the rest of the day, and the Casino Club has its own restaurants.

Wellness

The Greenbrier Spa draws on the sulphur springs that founded the resort, with mineral baths, treatment rooms and indoor and outdoor pools. Golf is the other tradition: the Old White course, designed by Charles Blair Macdonald in 1914, hosted the PGA Tour from 2010 to 2019, and the Greenbrier course hosted the Ryder Cup in 1979 and the Solheim Cup in 1994. Sam Snead was the resort's professional for decades.

Weddings and events

The resort has meeting and ballroom space on a scale that suits national conventions as well as weddings: Colonial Hall, Chesapeake Hall and the Cameo Ballroom are the principal rooms, with a conference centre and dozens of smaller rooms around them, and the lawns and the springhouse serve ceremonies. Weddings range from small ceremonies at the springhouse to receptions for several hundred.

Location

White Sulphur Springs lies in the Allegheny Mountains near the Virginia line, some 400 kilometres south-west of Washington. Amtrak's Cardinal line stops at the resort's own station across the road from the entrance; Greenbrier Valley Airport at Lewisburg is a drive of about 15 minutes, and Interstate 64 passes the town.