Twin Farms

In 1928 the novelist Sinclair Lewis, two years before he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, bought a farm above the village of Barnard, Vermont, as a wedding present for the journalist Dorothy Thompson. Twin Farms, as the 300-acre property was already called, became the couple's summer house and, after their divorce in 1942, Thompson's home until her death in 1961.

History

Thompson's visitors at Twin Farms included much of the literary and political world of the 1930s and 1940s, and the farmhouse where she wrote her columns is still the core of the inn. After her death the property passed through private hands until Thurston Twigg-Smith, the Honolulu newspaper publisher and art collector, and his wife Sharon bought it with the idea of a country inn that would run like a private house. They opened Twin Farms in 1993. It has since been sold on but keeps the same format: one rate covers rooms, all meals, wine and spirits, and every activity on the estate.

Architecture and design

The interiors of the opening were by Jed Johnson, the New York decorator who had been Andy Warhol's partner and who died in the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996. His farmhouse rooms set the tone: antiques, folk art and deep upholstery, with the Twigg-Smith collection of twentieth-century art on the walls, including works by Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly and David Hockney. The cottages added over the years are each on a different theme, from a Moroccan tent to a Japanese-style house to a treehouse in the woods, spaced far enough apart along the hillside that none can see another.

Rooms and suites

Twin Farms has twenty accommodations: rooms in the Main House and the Lodge, and ten free-standing cottages. Cottages have fireplaces, screened porches, soaking tubs and in several cases their own hot tub or steam room. The inn is for adults only; guests must be over 18. There is no front desk and no signing for anything.

Dining

There is no menu. The chef asks each guest about preferences on arrival and composes the day's meals accordingly, served in the Main House dining room, in the cottage, by the pond or as a picnic on a hike. Much of the produce comes from the estate's gardens and from Vermont farms and dairies. The cellar holds a large list that is included in the rate, and the bar in the Main House is self-service.

Wellness

The Out of the Woods spa sits in the trees with treatment rooms, a Japanese furo soaking tub and a fitness room. Outdoors, the estate has a private ski hill with its own lift and groomed runs, cross-country ski trails, snowshoeing, a pond for canoeing and swimming in summer, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, mountain bikes and miles of walking trails. Everything is included and unscheduled: guests ask and the staff arrange it.

Weddings and events

Twin Farms hosts weddings and private celebrations, almost always as a buyout of the whole property so that the twenty rooms, the dining room and the grounds belong to one party for the weekend. Small corporate retreats and board meetings use the same format. The inn does not run a public events calendar.

Location

Barnard is a village of a few hundred people in central Vermont, about 20 minutes north of Woodstock. The nearest commercial airport is Lebanon, New Hampshire, roughly 40 minutes away; Burlington is about 90 minutes and Boston around two and a half hours by car. Amtrak's Vermonter stops at White River Junction, half an hour away. Of the luxury hotels in Vermont, this is the one with a Nobel laureate's farmhouse at its heart.