The Omni Homestead Resort

Hot Springs, Virginia, is a village of one street, and the street is dominated by a red-brick tower with a white cupola that rises above the trees of the Allegheny valley. The Omni Homestead Resort has stood here in one form or another since before the United States existed, and the mineral springs that brought the first visitors still fill its pools.

History

Thomas Bullitt built the first Homestead lodge beside the springs in 1766, on land surveyed by a young George Washington's associates in the Virginia militia. Thomas Jefferson took the waters at the Warm Springs pools, five miles up the valley, in 1818, and the Jefferson Pools there remain part of the resort. Through the nineteenth century the Homestead grew into a summer resort for the planter and then the railway classes; the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway reached the valley in the 1890s and a syndicate led by J. P. Morgan's associates rebuilt the hotel. The Old Course opened in 1892. Fire destroyed the wooden hotel in 1901, and the brick building that replaced it opened in 1902. The tower was added in 1929.

The resort's great period ran between the wars, when the Cascades course was laid out by William Flynn in 1923 and Sam Snead, born in the valley, learned the game on the property and later served as its golf professional. During the Second World War the hotel briefly interned Japanese diplomats. The Homestead was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991. KSL Capital bought the resort in 2006 and Omni Hotels and Resorts took it over in 2013, after which it was renamed The Omni Homestead Resort and restored in stages, most recently the tower and the spa in 2022 and 2023.

Architecture and design

The main building is a long red-brick range in a Georgian and Colonial Revival manner, with white trim, a columned porch along the front and the 1929 tower at its centre. The Great Hall inside runs the length of the ground floor, a corridor of columns, fireplaces and seating where afternoon tea has been served for a century. The dining room, the Crystal Room, has chandeliers and tall windows, and the public rooms keep their pre-war plasterwork and panelling. The grounds cover about 2,000 acres of valley and hillside.

Rooms and suites

The resort has 483 rooms and suites in the main building and its wings. Rooms range from the compact originals on the upper floors to suites in the tower and the south wing, and many look over the first fairway of the Old Course or the mountains behind.

Dining

The Dining Room, the formal room off the Great Hall, serves breakfast and dinner, with dancing to a band on some evenings in the old manner. Jefferson's is the steak restaurant, the Casino Club serves lunch by the Old Course, and Rubino's at the Cascades clubhouse takes golfers. The Great Hall itself serves afternoon tea and cocktails. Smaller cafés and a market serve the pool and water park in summer.

Wellness

The spa draws on the springs: the Serenity Garden has outdoor soaking pools fed by the warm mineral water, and the indoor pool, built in 1903, is also spring-fed. The Jefferson Pools at Warm Springs, the octagonal bathhouses of 1761 and 1836, reopened after restoration in 2022. Allegheny Springs, the two-acre water park with a lazy river, serves families in summer, and there are tennis courts, a fitness centre, a shooting club, falconry and horse riding on the estate.

Weddings and events

The resort hosts weddings on the lawns and in the ballroom, and its meeting rooms, among them the Crystal Room, the Empire Room and the Regency Room, serve conferences of up to several hundred delegates. The Great Hall is used for receptions. Capacities depend on the room and the layout.

Location

Hot Springs is in Bath County in the Allegheny Mountains, on the West Virginia border, about 80 kilometres north of Roanoke and three hours by car from Washington, D.C. Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional is the nearest commercial airport, about an hour and a half away; the resort's own Ingalls Field takes private aircraft. There is no passenger rail to the valley; Amtrak serves Clifton Forge, about 40 minutes away. As a luxury hotel in Hot Springs it is the only one, and the village exists around it.