Front Street Inn

The Front Street Inn couldn’t be better. We just indulged ourselves in a getaway weekend in our own Wilmington, NC, and chose the Front Street Inn in part for its resemblance to the little bed and breakfast in Boonville, CA, a couple hours north of San Francisco, where we were married almost exactly ten years ago.

Proprietorship of the Front Street Inn changed hands three years ago to the pleasant, Massachusetts transplants Richard and Polly, who also employ a dry-humored, fey hipster named Robert to run the night desk, show folks around, and suggest local happenings. But the place still bears the imprint of its inventors, whom I suspect either shopped constantly at the tony, colorful Down Island Traders or else owned that store outright themselves — and indeed bears the imprint of its Salvation Army building origins, with its many stairwells, old bricks, and location right in the middle of things.

We stayed in the Hemingway, the suite that runs the length of the upstairs on Front Street proper, and features a private iron balcony looking onto the doomed and weird Chandler’s Wharf shops, the Cape Fear river, the thick elm trees. We drank coffee up there, wine at night, read our books, the paper.

The suite also features a large, central whirlpool tub with louvered doors, a big fireplace and also a fridge, and is imagined as a kind of Hemingway island output (and “Hemingway” is great naming here too: booky, quiet, but colorful, caribbean, but urban, but remote, private, manly.)

The breakfasts were great and sausage-oriented. The grounds are lush and unbelievably bucolic given proximity to downtown — we walked to dinner both night and heard the St. James bells. The stay there was expensive but absolutely transporting — and peerless in Wilmington, as far as I know.