Stephen Wendell's business had opened 28 hotels, but setting out to create the Hill Hall Hotel from a pair of old school buildings was the most personal.
The new 40-room hotel is in Fayetteville, West Virginia, a town of only about 3,000 residents that sits at the gateway to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. While it only received its national park distinction in January 2021, the small town has long been known to adventure seekers.
"Fayetteville has been a tourism adventure sport spot for a lot of people, and kind of a secret spot," Wendell, CEO of Mountain Shore Properties, said. "You know, the secret's probably getting out."
As momentum was building for the town's tourism economy, he saw an opportunity to return to the town he grew up in and bring it a boutique hotel experience Fayetteville has grown into deserving.
Building the Fayetteville experience
Wendell spent a good portion of his childhood in Fayetteville, but his family has an even deeper history in the small town.
"My grandmother, Pat Wendell, who we call Patsy, was instrumental in getting the town designated historic in the early '90s, which then paved the way for a historic tax credit project that we did 10 years after her passing," Wendell said.
Mountain Shore Properties has worked on a series of municipal building renovation projects, including turning the old elementary school into apartments and the gym into a coworking space. During the pandemic, Ascend West Virginia, a remote work incentive program, drew new residents to West Virginia — and many have stayed put.
The next step for Wendell was converting the next two municipal buildings — the 1923 high school building and the 1955 middle school building, which was most recently used as the police office — into a boutique hotel.
Fayetteville and West Virginia as a whole are often overlooked as a tourism destination, Wendell said, even as the outdoors adventures have grown in popularity.
"But we obviously have known about it for a very long time from being from there, and we've experienced world class whitewater rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking and hiking — and it's all within 10 minutes of the town of Fayetteville," he added.
Amy Summerford, general manager at the Hill Hall Hotel, has lived in the town for over 20 years, and she's seen the town evolve into a destination for visitors.
"Fayetteville's been experiencing a major glow up over the last few years, of getting in this really great variety of locally owned shops and boutiques and art galleries and restaurants of different sorts," she said, "and this project was kind of like the final move in the glow up or the level up, if you will — to have a lodging option that matched what the town is kind of leveled up to."
Now, not only does the town attract the adventure seekers, but multi-generational travelers are coming in and finding their own experiences.
"It's kind of the microcosm of the macrocosm of Fayetteville. It's just a little bit of everything, and we're all just doing our own thing together, and it works, and it's great," Summerford said of the town's recent development.
The other challenge is Fayetteville's infrastructure isn't particularly ready for an influx of travelers, but Wendell set out to help change this for the one-stoplight town.
"We just built their visitors center for them and leased it back to them, so that there's public bathrooms, a place for people to gather and get information as they come to the national park town," he said. "So there's all kinds of those things that we've been kind of thinking about and doing."
It's worth noting, Wendell said, that Fayetteville might not exist if it weren't for its tourism economy's momentum.
"A lot of the (nearby) towns ... have gone by the wayside because we aren't a coal mining state anymore. So yeah, this is one of the large businesses that has to happen," he said.
Family focused with nostalgic nods
The first challenge with the hotel's conversion construction was its two distinctive buildings. The high school building was constructed in 1923 by Italian immigrant stonemasons. As early settlers of the town, they were responsible for a few of the original buildings in town.
The builders used the region's unique Nuttall Sandstone, which is a durable, quartz-rich rock layer that was cut out of the mountain and pulled out of the gorge, Summerford said. The material gives the building a sparkly pink appearance.
"It is the same stone that made the New River Gorge a really popular climbing destination," she explained. "This particular type of stone only exists in one other place in the world in South Africa, and so it's a really unique climbing opportunity for people and is what kind of put Fayetteville on the map for climbing."
In contrast, the middle school building was constructed in 1955 and has all the characteristics one would expect from a mid-century brick building, Wendell said. The building also had been used as a police station, which added an extra layer of design challenges.
But marrying the two drastically different buildings into a cohesive boutique hotel was among the earliest challenges for Mae Pate, head of design for Mountain Shore Properties.
"I was lucky because when it's a renovation, I feel like the building very much tells you what it wants to be," Pate said, adding that working within the historic renovation process was also helpful. "There are very strict guidelines, which are great."
She said she relied on a consistency of furniture and paint colors to bring cohesion into the hotel, and sprinkled nostalgic elements to the buildings' history as school buildings.
"You'll kind of notice a lot of nods to school without it being too themed like a school — a lot of the datum points that you'll see in a school, like the chalkboards, posters lining the the hallways," she said. "We didn't add back lockers or anything like that, but we added those datum points to kind of like nod back to that. So it was really an effort to keep these architectural elements, but also soften it up.
"And a lot of that inspiration came from the Wendell family and all of the stories that they've told," she added.
Given the Wendell family's history in the town, building Hill Hall Hotel was always going to be family-focused. The biggest example of the Wendell family influence is the hotel's restaurant, Patsy's. Not only is the eatery named for matriarch Pat Wendell, but her handmade recipe book inspired the menu.
One of the earliest notes Stephen Wendell said he had for the project was using his grandmother's Chex mix recipe as a bar snack. Now, he's considering bringing the Chex mix to his other properties.
"For a little town, we have multiple wonderful places to eat," he said. "But we wanted to create a dinner place that brought up this nostalgia."
Beyond the menu, which includes other Patsy-inspired Appalachian comfort dishes, the design of the restaurant was also inspired by the office of Stephen's dad, Charlie, with its displays of historic photographs. The dining room also has a shelf of books reminiscent of a school library.
Pate said one of her favorite elements of the hotel is a full-room mural that sits next to the wood-paneled principal's office-style reception area. The mural, painted by a West Virginian artist Nichole Westfall, was inspired by the idea of a school classroom mural but gives guests the feeling of a Sunday drive through West Virginia's splendor.
"That is my favorite nod — not only to the landscape of West Virginia because it's a West Virginia landscape, but also to that school mural," Pate said.
So far, guests have really appreciated the "nods" to the storied past of the buildings. Summerford said guests come in and share their stories, so at this point, she knows where a lot of first kisses took place. Now as a public space as a hotel, the property is no longer a school or closed-off building, so former students can walk around and even stay in their former classrooms.
"It depends on how much sleep I've had, but I can easily do a happy cry when folks come through (who) had been to school here at some point in the game and they're literally like walking down memory lane at the same time that they're taking in the way that it's been treated," she said. "They're all just so blown away by the scope of it and the choices that got made, and grateful that it's not just sitting here falling apart anymore."
Wendell said the project has been really fun and even therapeutic for him to embed so much of his family and love for the town into the project. While the $14 million project might be small in the scale of hospitality, it's an impactful one on the community and region.
"I just hope that this is a proper introduction or reintroduction to West Virginia for whether you've been here before or not, and that you know people come and enjoy this space in in their time in Fayetteville," he said. "I'm excited for the world to experience Fayetteville and West Virginia in this way."