Like many New Yorkers craving a slower pace of life, the tastemaking entrepreneur Taavo Somer and his wife Courtney made frequent excursions to the Hudson Valley, eventually buying a little stone house in Accord, New York in 2008. For the better part of a decade, “we were going back and forth every weekend, but then we started going up early or staying later. We kept thinking about upstate during the week and didn’t feel as connected to the city,” he says. With their children getting older and kindergarten interviews becoming the norm, Manhattan no longer “felt like the right fit for my family,” Somer adds, and so in 2016, they sought out the Hudson Valley fulltime.
Almost immediately, the enterprising Somer—known for such successful venues as the Lower East Side alleyway restaurant Freemans and late West Village bar the Rusty Knot—started to develop something rooted in the idyllic locale. As he met fellow residents and visiting regulars, he thought “it would be great to make a place where we could all hang out that wasn’t just our houses,” he says. And so, he began scoping out woodlands and vacant land. During one memorable drive, Somer “happened to notice the sun setting on what I thought was a field but was a former golf course,” he recalls. “I turned in, went up the road, and was blown away by the view. It just clicked: This could be an amazing location. The land is already cleared, and I can imagine letting the golf course go wild and back to nature.”
The cabins at Inness feature private decks that look out onto the rolling hills
It was poised to become Inness, the family-friendly compound that Somer had envisioned. Named for the 19th-century American landscape painter George Inness, the 225-acre hotel and members’ club opened in 2021, flaunting minimalist architecture and design from Brooklyn and Jackson, Wyoming-based Post Company. In addition to 28 cabins, 12 farmhouse accommodations, and a restaurant and lounge are an abundance of recreational activities like swimming pools, tennis courts, hiking trails, and of course, a new nine-hole golf course from Chattanooga, Tennessee-based golf course design firm King-Collins. A three-acre organic farm is also found on the grounds designed by Brooklyn landscape architect Miranda Brooks, as well as a sporting outfitter and lifestyle and home décor shop. A spa, complete with outdoor sauna deck, will soon make its debut.
While Somer embarked on bringing Inness to life, he also sought out office space for his wife’s fragrance business, encountering a broker who suggested he meet local developer Charles Blaichman. Blaichman was looking for someone to open a restaurant in Kingston, New York, and although Somer wasn’t initially interested in such a venture, the two hit it off, leading Somer to preside over the F&B at the Studio Robert McKinley-designed Hotel Kinsley in 2020. Blaichman also saw the potential of Inness and joined forces with Somer on that project, too. (CBSK Ironsgate, Michael Barry, and Lee Pollock are also partners on the project.)
Farmhouse accommodations teem with vintage pieces and found objects for a highly curated and lived-in feel
A sprawling one-stop country getaway, Inness is an ambitious undertaking well-suited for Post Company, a practice known for crafting such recent rural New York retreats as the Lake House on Canandaigua in the Finger Lakes and the Catskills resort Callicoon Hills. Somer, himself an architect, worked in close collaboration with the design team, who “were captivated by the land,” says Post Company partner Leigh Salem. “The weird thing about a golf course that’s grown back is that you have these beautiful rolling hills like the English countryside.”
The backdrop, he explains, was a springboard to creating a destination “that has breadth and space—something that ties into the larger community of the Hudson Valley.” That scale was important to Somer, who notes there is often a half-hour drive between some of the area’s most coveted restaurants, shops, and attractions. “The idea was to have enough gravitational pull that Inness could be a place you literally don’t have to leave for a few days,” he says.
Belgian linen sofas and decorative fireplaces are found in the farmhouse guestrooms
With the landscape as the star, both Somer and Salem agreed that the design should be quiet and supportive of the surroundings, culminating in a layout that presents a journey between buildings and encourages visitors to “relate to the landscape,” says Salem. “It’s a different experience from a traditional hotel because [the guests] have to walk across the site.”
Post Company showcased Inness through a “gradient of architectural references,” adds Salem. Consider the restaurant (a hit among non-overnight guests, too) situated in a long clapboard structure with no overhang. Limewashed walls and seating salvaged from a Belgian church complement paned glass, used to amplify vistas. The cabins then act as a bridge between the Scandinavian-influenced restaurant and the farmhouse, which is “much more historic to what you see driving around the Hudson Valley,” says Salem. The design team played off the local vernacular via a more restrained lens. First, Post Company designed the ground-floor gathering spaces to resemble a home, including a kitchen that attracts laptop-toting members. Then, Salem layered in the guestrooms with unexpected elements like decorative fireplaces and historic moldings that draw from its older neighbors.
A view onto the grounds from the clubhouse, home to the restaurant and members’ lounge
There are plenty of custom pieces throughout, including furniture and lighting that spawned collections with Roll & Hill, but “a huge component was us running around buying vintage furniture, fixtures, art, and objects,” says Salem. A careful curation of one-of-a-kind items sourced from stores in nearby Stone Ridge in New York, as well as Connecticut and the Brimfield Antiques Flea Market in Massachusetts, makes Inness appear familiar and lived-in. It instills a patina, a sense of timelessness that corresponds with such architectural features as corrugated metal and graying cedar siding. “I was looking at the event barn the other day and you can’t tell if it’s 200 years old or a minimalist design. It goes back and forth between a historical building and a modern one,” Somer says.
Plotting numerous structures simultaneously was what Salem calls an “iterative process. We’d start with an idea of what the building should be, and we’d go stake it out and realize the orientation was wrong.” Developing Inness during the pandemic also posed challenges, but the forced slowdown gave the team permission to explore every building’s dialogue with the trees and paths to ensure they took the right form.
Orchestrating the myriad details “when the world was shutting down also caused us to lean on existing relationships and people who really cared,” Salem adds. Such a personal approach dovetails with the Inness ethos. Although the cabins lend themselves to much-desired isolation, when unwinding at the farmhouse, guests are essentially “at someone’s weekend house with strangers,” says Somer. “What’s cool to see is that they become friends and go on hikes or have dinner together, which is what we hoped would happen.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s April 2022 issue.
