The Inn at Longshore reopened to guests and events in August, after a renovation its operator calls far larger than anyone planned. “Everything has been replaced,” Charles Mallory, founder and chief executive of Delamar Collections, told the Westport Journal on Oct. 5. “It was a much, much bigger job than we had anticipated and the building was really in horrific shape.”
The building is owned by the town and sits in Longshore Club Park, overlooking the Saugatuck River and Long Island Sound. Mallory’s group took a 30-year lease on the 21,000-square-foot inn in 2023, on the condition that it put $8 million into renovations, he told Westfair Communications at a Sept. 30 press preview. He said the figure could ultimately reach $11 million. Inklings, the Staples High School newspaper, reported that the inn closed in January 2025 and that this was its first renovation in 40 years.
What the walls were hiding
The trouble surfaced as soon as the walls came open. “The minute you got behind it, there was a problem,” Mallory told the Journal. “It was just an ongoing drama of finding new problems and having to repair them.”
The list reads like a whole-house replacement. Plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems were replaced, along with the windows, shingles, siding and insulation, and a long-leaking roof was dealt with, according to the Journal. Michael Ryan, the innkeeper, put the share of the building replaced at “75, 80, 90 percent.”
“The bones are still here but there’s really no (preexisting) drywall left. There’s no lighting left,” Ryan said. Mallory went further in talking with Westfair, saying that all that was left of the original house was its footprint and its shell.
Turning the house toward the water
The biggest design change was the approach. The front entrance was moved and the building opened toward the waterfront, with a new portico, the Journal reported. Guests now arrive at a lobby with a view straight through the restored ballroom to the lawn and the water beyond, Westfair wrote. An elevator now serves the inn’s three floors, and a larger kitchen serves both La Plage, the restaurant on the grounds, and the inn’s banquets.
The reorientation also changed what the rooms see. Mallory said more than half of them now have water views, where only a handful did before. Wedding parties no longer have to hold ceremonies in front of the restaurant, the Journal reported. They can walk from the ballroom down an aisle to the water.
Furnishing a story
The estate’s past was the brief for the interiors. Frederick Lewis bought the property in 1910, and over the decades it served as a private residence, a country club, an inn and a gathering place, the Journal reported. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald spent several months of 1920 in a rented cottage nearby, as our story on the Fitzgeralds’ Westport summer recounts, and the inn leans on that connection.
The designer, Ryann Hackett of Ryann Swan Design, told the Journal that her firm researched both the building and Connecticut history. Westfair reported that she went to the Greenwich and Westport libraries to study historic wallpapers and furniture rather than relying on internet searches. The result uses custom furnishings, textiles and wallpaper drawn from the property’s 1920s history without turning it into a period hotel.
It’s a book that’s been written and we just want to open a new chapter and still pay tribute to what it was.
Ryann Hackett, Ryann Swan Design, to the Westport Journal
Westfair described a cream, blue and purple palette with Art Deco-style chandeliers, golden, shell-shaped sconces and blue-and-white floral tile in the showers. Works by Westport artists hang throughout, including John Bygott and Miggs Burroughs, whose lenticular pieces of local scenes are in the lobby. Mallory said artwork, landscaping and other finishing touches are still under way.
What an owner can take from it
The inn is a public building run by a hotel company, not a family house, and its numbers are its own. But the pattern will be familiar to anyone who has opened up an older house. The real scope appeared only once the walls came down, the systems behind them were due all at once, and the operator now says the cost could climb from $8 million to $11 million, about 38 percent more by simple arithmetic.
Two lessons carry over. Open up what you can before you commit to a number, and hold a contingency large enough to absorb the surprise. And as the inn shows, keeping a building’s footprint and character does not require keeping every board. For a house where the original fabric is the point, our story on saving a Riverside Avenue saltbox shows the tools Westport offers. For owners weighing whether to take on that work before a sale at all, the Seller’s Desk sets out the trade-offs.
Sources
- Westport Journal, From “horrific shape” to “world class”, the transformation of the Inn at Longshore, Oct. 5, 2026
- Westfair Communications, Back to the future, Oct. 5, 2026
- Inklings News, A new roaring 20’s, the renovation of the Inn at Longshore, Sept. 19, 2026
