COMPANY PROFILE
Bristol Harbor Inn
Owners: Lloyd Adams, Raymond Dan, Daniel Wightman
Type of business: Boutique hotel, restaurant and function facility
Location: 259 Thames St., Bristol
Employees: 16, plus 25 at DeWolf Tavern
Year established: 2001
Annual Sales: WND
A boutique hotel and tavern breathe new life into centuries-old buildings
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
Guests at the Bristol Harbor Inn eat breakfast in the Rum Room, named after the distillery that occupied the space two centuries ago. Construction workers found 18 ancient casks there under a concrete floor installed by the lumber company that last owned the building.
The formal dining room of the inn’s DeWolf Tavern is decorated with slabs of graffiti – black scribblings on gray plaster, with dates from the late 19th century, found behind a stack of moldings. Outside, the building’s south wall leans inward, from where the Prudence Island Ferry smashed into it during the 1938 hurricane. It’s been reinforced, but not straightened.
Lloyd Adams, managing partner of the inn and the tavern as well as Thames Street Landing, the waterfront retail and dining complex they anchor, clearly loves being surrounded by all that history, and he’s let it define the character of the entire property.
From the street, the buildings look as if time had stopped in the mid-1800s. Inside, the hotel rooms are classically decorated – though along with lacy curtains and four-post beds, they also feature free high-speed Internet access. The tavern has modern furnishings, but also exposed original ceiling beams and tree-trunk columns to replicate the 1818 originals.
“Enjoy water-view accommodations in a quintessential New England coastal village,” invites a promotional sheet for the inn. The Web site proudly lists the names of each of the historic buildings, the oldest of which opened in 1797 as the Bank of Bristol.
But Adams isn’t one of those romantics who fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening an historic inn or a restaurant. He’s a retired engineer and a pragmatist.
When he moved to Bristol with his wife in 1994, after 28 years at the Foxboro Co. in Massachusetts, he just wanted a nice place to live. But soon they opened a five-room bed and breakfast, the Bradford Dimond Norris House.
And when two college friends, Daniel Wightman and Raymond Dan, came to visit, they talked about all the wasted potential on the town’s waterfront. “Nothing was going on in Bristol at the time on the waterfront,” Adams recalled. Most of it was shut off to the public, and the buildings were in dire condition, vacant or used just as warehouses.
The following winter, Adams and Wightman visited Dan at his home in the Philippines, and in a late-night conversation, they decided to invest in a stretch of the Bristol waterfront. By 1998, they had acquired five historic buildings and some vacant parcels. They hired Newport Collaborative Architects to help them make most of the property.
The goal: to come up with the mix of uses “that would give us the highest long-term return,” Adams said. “We didn’t buy this to turn it over quickly.”
They broke ground on Labor Day weekend, 1999, and opened the first building, with retail space, offices and apartments, in May 2000. The inn followed in August 2001. The last three buildings, including the tavern, opened in the fall of 2004. Altogether, Adams said, it was a roughly $10 million project.
They kept direct control of the inn and tavern, Adams said, because “they were the largest, key elements” of the project, so they wanted to ensure they’d have the right “feel.” They hired experienced staff to run the 40-room inn, and when the restaurant was ready, they brought in manager Melicia Philips and her husband, Indian-born chef Sai Viswanath, to run it.
The tavern has been a big success, packed on weekends and widely praised for its blend of traditional New England, contemporary American and Indian cuisine. In November, Esquire magazine named it one of the top 20 new restaurants in the nation.
The inn has taken longer to flourish. At first, business was “very seasonal,” Adams said, and it still is, to a great extent. To balance it all out, the team has worked to grow occupancy on three fronts at once: Roger Williams University, business travelers and corporate groups, and “heritage” tourism, which he’s also working to build with a group called Destination Bristol.
“We are seeing continual improvement,” Adams said, “but there’s still room for growth in each of the areas.”
