The Rhinecliff Hotel sits just off the railroad tracks along the Hudson River. It's a work in progress.
On a Monday morning, Michaela Carpenter, who recently re-opened the hotel with her husband, is showing me around the property. Her small dog, Cricket, scampers along beside her. He's a schnoodle, she tells me - a schnauzer-poodle mix.
Carpenter's vision for the hotel is also a mix. The Rhinecliff was built in 1854, and as we step into the restaurant on the ground floor, she points out the knotted wood planks and copper accents that have anchored the bar since it was built.
"For almost 200 years," Carpenter says, "This has been a space of gathering on the train line on the river."
Carpenter plans to keep as much of the original wood as possible, even though it makes the floors creaky. She says that’s part of the place’s charm – just like the noise from the railroad tracks. "Before we really got into the space, we were extremely nervous about the train noise for our sleeping hotel guests," she recalls, laughing. "But we very quickly have seen that actually guests quite enjoy it. There's a romance to it."
Romance is central to the new Rhinecliff experience Carpenter envisions. The hotel has nine rooms, and recently put out a call to Hudson Valley artists to submit works that will inspire the design for each one. Carpenter points to a wall in one of the rooms where an abstract painting with green accents will soon be mounted. "We will be using the elements from the photograph to then inform the other design decisions in the room and in the space," she says. No two rooms will look the same. "Every room is going to be unique in its experience, in its design, in its expression, in its personality."
Carpenter is talking about things in the future tense because the Rhinecliff is not yet fully operational. Guests can book rooms, but the rest of the amenities aren’t available yet. At the end of the summer, the hotel will close again, and they’ll finish building out the restaurant, as well as a big, airy room with a fireplace that Carpenter calls The Commons. It will be, she tells me, a space for "events, programming, community gathering, daytime co-working, waiting for the train, drinking good coffee."
All of this is going to take time and money. Carpenter and her partners are in the process of raising capital from private investors and taking out loans to finalize it. It's all happening as towns and villages around the Hudson Valley are interrogating their relationship with fancy hotels. A pair of luxury projects – the Soho House and Six Senses Resort – are looking to expand their footprint in nearby towns. Earlier this summer, just down the road in Rhinebeck, the town board introduced a proposed law that would impose a nine-month moratorium on hospitality developments, to study their impact on the environment and the community.
That wouldn’t necessarily impact what’s happening at the Rhinecliff – but I'm curious how the bigger conversation is impacting Carpenter's thinking. When I ask her about it, she pauses for a moment. "Hotels are such an opportunity to be a part of an environment, and I think that it's such an honor to be able to translate that through my own lens as to what that means, looks like, and feels like," she says. "I think we really hold that at the forefront of our minds: how does this contribute to what surrounds us? How does this amplify the the assets that are already here and that already exist? We want the space to feel vibrant and really of the people. I think the most interesting spaces have different walks of life in them, and I think when you get different types of people and, community members and visitors and locals in a shared space, there's an element of unspoken tension, and I think that that makes space really vibrant, and really interesting."
"What are the things that inform that tension for you?" I ask.
"I don't think that they actually have to be like a negative tension," Carpenter replies. "I think it's just sort of a natural charge. It's like if we're little atoms, we're moving through space and time in a in a different way, in a different rhythm, in a different motion. And so, if I show up into engagement with the assumption that we both have contributions to that engagement. What can happen? That's my favorite question. What if? Could tension be positive? Could tension be actually generative? Isn't that interesting? Don't you want to come be a part of that?"
