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The people who own the Ace Hotel Portland have created a bougie hotel in the forest.
After purchasing the lodge in October, the Suttle Lodge & Boathouse are now taking reservations for stays beginning tonight. Rates start at $125/night for camp cabins and $275/night for lodge rooms.
That's right—the people behind the Ace Hotel Portland , Pepe Le Moko and Spirit of 77 are bringing hip nostalgic minimalism to the forest.
Photos of the lodge show it's perfectly poising to become a destination hotel for Portlanders seeking to add a little Wes Anderson nostalgia and hiker-cool green to their Instagrams.
All overly-hipness aside—it sounds pretty awesome.
The resort includes a collection of rustic cabins in the forest, located on a 15.5-acre property on the shore of Suttle Lake, near Sisters. There's also a lodge, lakeside cabins, a cocktail bar, a boathouse, boat rentals (including paddle boards) and a restaurant called The Boathouse, which is set to open next month with a menu created by Joshua McFadden of Ava Gene's.
Related: Ava Gene's Is the Runner-Up for Our Restaurant of the Year
The yurt-style camp cabins start at $125, which have no water running water, but they do have electricity.
McFadden also helped develop a restaurant in the lodge, which includes chips and trout dip, salmon croquettes and a salmon sandwich. The lodge bar, which is called Skip, will feature original cocktails, designed by former Teardrop Lounge manager and bartender Sean Hoard. The back of the lodge will have a beer garden, which will open in just a couple of weeks and will have local beer on tap, like Bend's Good Life.
Related: Escape to Bend for Great Beer
Donald Kenney of Mighty Union first went and looked at the property two years ago. He was interested, but nothing happened for about a year. When the lodge was still available for purchase in October 2015, Robert Sacks and David Schrott, the owners of lodge decided to buy it, hiring Mighty Union to design and run the hotel.
"We weren't necessarily looking for a lodge in the forest, but it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to find a place like that, so we had to jump at the opportunity," Kenney says.
The same spot has had a series of lodges since the 1920s. Most of them were destroyed by fires, and the most recent lodge, called the Lodge at Suttle Lake, was built in 2005. The space is especially important to Suttle, as it's the lake's only public lodging.
"I think that site has been a source of nostalgic attachment for a large number of people for a very long time. We had number of people who wandered in and said, "I've been coming here since the early '40s' and eating at the boathouse with their parents," he says. "There's a nostalgia to that lake and that region."
Since October, the owners have been redesigning the lodge to match the understated minimalist aesthetic the Ace Hotel Portland is famous for. Partnering with Austin-based design firm Land, they switched out old teddy bears and taxidermy for Pendleton blankets with the Suttle Lake Lodge logo, and added understated canvas and cork walls. For the lodge's upstairs rooms, they added staircases to create sleeping lofts.
"We looked at what the space gave us: a rustic Cascadian-style timber lodge, which makes sense for the materials sued in this part of the world. There was a natural response to that," Kenney says. "We couldn't go make it disco modern."
Kenney says the lodge marks a major step in welcoming Portland-bound tourists to other parts of Oregon.
He says that having been in the hotel and travel industry, he frequently hears tourists talking about wanting to explore the rest of the state, but not knowing where to start.
"People can just stop by, sit in the beer garden, sun yourself on the dock, just enjoy it—that's the context I see people acting t in that space," he says. "It's finally going to be something in this region that stands out as a beacon."
Willamette Week