IN A SMALL VERMONT VILLAGE, A FAMILY WITH A FORMIDABLE HOTEL PEDIGREE HAS CREATED A NINE-ROOM INN WHERE AUTUMN COMES WITH A REMINDER THAT SOMETIMES THE BEST REASON TO TRAVEL IS SIMPLY TO CATCH A SEASON BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS.
BY ANETTA NOWOSIELSKA
If you find the idea of driving hundreds of miles to look at leaves ridiculous, chances are you’ve never been to Vermont in the fall. Once you have, you understand.
The maples don’t merely change color here. They put on a show. Whole mountainsides go red, orange, and yellow seemingly at once. Leaves gather along stone walls and two-lane roads. Pumpkins appear on porches. Apples come in paper bags. Somewhere, inevitably, there is cider.
For somebody arriving from South Florida, where October can still involve air-conditioning and linen, the whole thing feels wonderfully foreign.
That may explain why fall in Vermont has become less a season than a pilgrimage. People watch foliage maps, argue about peak weekend, and book rooms months ahead, chasing the increasingly rare pleasure of being somewhere at exactly the right moment.
Weston is the sort of Vermont village they hope to find. There is a green, a white church, old houses, and Main Street, with the Green Mountains rising around it.
And on Main Street sits The Weston. It has nine rooms. That should tell you almost everything you need to know.
Opened in late 2023, The Weston was conceived by the Sharp family as a country house rather than a resort. From the road, its white-clapboard buildings are demure, perfectly content to blend into the village. Inside, the mood changes. The rooms are layered, colorful, and deeply personal, mixing floral wallpapers and rich fabrics with English and American antiques, vintage art, hand-carved poster beds, and pieces from the Sharp family’s own collection.
There are old pine floors underfoot, hand-painted fireplace panels, deep soaking tubs, and Lefroy Brooks fittings. One room might contain an eighteenth-century cabinet, another, a vintage Pan Am poster. The effect is less decorated than accumulated. Good taste abounds.
For all its country-house ease, The Weston comes with some serious hotel pedigree. The family’s hospitality history includes The Carlyle, Gramercy Park Hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, the Stanhope, Ritz Tower, and Delmonico’s. Yet The Weston wears the pedigree lightly.
“We wanted The Weston to feel less like a hotel and more like the country home of a thoughtful host—beautiful and deeply comfortable, with every detail anticipated but nothing overly formal,” says owner JD Sharp. “Our family has spent generations in hospitality, and this property gave us the opportunity to bring that experience to a place we love in a way that feels intimate, personal, and distinctly Vermont.”
The luxury here is largely atmospheric: a fire, a deep bath, a room you actually want to spend an afternoon in, and no particular urgency to be anywhere else.
Food follows much the same philosophy. At The Left Bank, Chef Bretton Combs brings Vermont ingredients to a French-minded menu that can include oysters, caviar, duck confit, steak au poivre, and tableside steak tartare.
Across the street, The Green Cat is part bakery, café, and gourmet market. A few miles away, the family’s regenerative farm supplies as much as ninety percent of the produce used by The Left Bank and The Green Cat during the height of the growing season. Farmers and chefs plan crops together, growing specialty ingredients and heirloom varieties with future menus in mind.
“What makes The Weston special is that the luxury is closely tied to the landscape and community around it,” Sharp says. “The farm, the restaurant, the bakery, and the hotel all inform one another, allowing guests to experience Vermont through its seasons, its food, and the people who make this place what it is.”
The same philosophy carries through to Le Spa, an intimate retreat with treatment rooms, yoga, a fitness center, steam amenities, and a sauna, particularly persuasive after a day spent hiking the Green Mountains or chasing foliage along Vermont’s back roads.
Hotel, restaurant, bakery, farm, and spa form their own small ecosystem, sophisticated without feeling removed from the place around them.
And perhaps that is the real luxury of coming here. There is something wonderfully extravagant about traveling north simply for cold mornings, apples, fireplaces, and trees changing color.
By November, most of those spectacular leaves will be on the ground.
Which is precisely why you go.
