High Society: A Family Stay at the Mohonk Mountain House

It’s a beautiful late Spring day, and I am looking out of the paneled windows of the Mohonk Mountain House’s grand dining room, enjoying a gorgeous panoramic view of the Catskills. This view has remained largely unchanged since the Hudson River School painters immortalized this region in the mid-19th century, and it’s interesting to ponder the many luminaries who sat here admiring this same view in days past.

The hallway that leads up to the dining room is filled with their photographs. People like the black civil rights leader Booker T. Washington and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Or the ultra-wealthy Rockefellers, who were apparently good friends with the Smiley family, the Quaker family that started the hotel in 1869 and still runs it to this day. The naturalist John Burroughs also visited here. As did Abdu’l-Baha Abbas, the leader of the Bahai faith, who gave a 1912 talk at the hotel entitled, “The Oneness of the Reality of Humankind.”

DAY ONE

Today, my 11-year-old daughter, Alice, and I count among the humankind loafing around the prestigious hotel’s hallowed hallways. We are here for an overnight stay (my wife, Edie, will arrive later.) We arrived here an hour ago, and unlike our esteemed predecessors, who would no doubt have rolled up in horse-drawn carriages trailed by servants dragging boxes of luggage, we got a ride from my friend Dylan, who has a modern but somewhat messy Subaru Outback.

After checking in and leaving our luggage with the concierge, we head to the dining room in time to sample the buffet brunch. The buffet is arranged across the spacious room’s center in a series of manned and self-service stations, offering mouth-watering entrées, breakfast options, signature omelets, and homemade pastries.

I help myself to a few slices of seared steak with a light and fluffy horseradish sauce, roasted sprouts, pan-fried asparagus and a cauliflower salad. Alice’s selection is a bit more eclectic and includes bagels with lox, a cinnamon bun topped with fresh cream, strips of bacon and (because her dad insists) some shaved cucumber.

Boating on Lake Mohonk

After lunch, we go for a boat ride on the shimmering waters of Lake Mohonk, the 17-acre glacial lake that the hotel fronts onto. The weather is blustery, and on the water, occasional flurries spin the rowboat around, making the going hard. I take up the helm and, between pants for breath, shout instructions that Alice is either mishearing over the noise of the wind or (and I suspect this is more likely) deliberately ignoring. I try to yell something about needing to stay coordinated, and she shouts back that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Later in the same boat trip, we are nearly overtaken by a peddle boat operated by a young family. Looking back, I see the children of the family, at least half Alice’s age, peddling hard, their faces a picture of grim determination.

The whole episode feels like a massive indictment of my liberal parenting style, and I retreat to the indoor swimming pool to nurse my bruised ego.

Swimming in luxury

Through the bank of windows, the orchestra of Spring is in full voice. The blue sky is turbulent with clouds, and the sunlight filtered through the dancing leaves makes an ever-changing mosaic of light on the stone tiles and comfortable loungers that surround the pool.

We’ve been here a couple of hours now, and in that short time, I feel myself relaxing into the warm womb of the hotel’s historic surroundings. Artists tend to rail against the idea of good taste, but it seems to me, hotels are one of those places where good taste is a prerequisite. After all, you need to feel at home in a hotel, so the best of them are always somewhat conservative in style.

That’s certainly true of the Mohonk Mountain House, where the grandiosity of its outward appearance is counteracted by interiors whose luxury never feels immoderate. Mixing modern amenities with Victorian-era opulence, Mohonk is both a hymn to former glories and a masterclass in how old-world charm can be repurposed for the present.

The 30,000-square-foot palatial spa annex, which features a swimming pool, is a perfect example of this. While the spa center is a relatively recent addition, completed in the early 2000s, other aspects of the hotel feel reassuringly old-fashioned, such as the geology talks in the grand old parlor room.

In the end, Alice and I decide to forego the 9 pm lecture on plate tectonics of the Shawangunk Ridge, preferring to conduct our own science experiment in the swimming pool, where we discover that the human voice travels pretty adequately underwater – especially if you’re singing “Apple” by Charli XCX.

DAY TWO

Shooting arrows in the forest

The next morning, the wind has died down, and the untroubled waters of the sky lake look like a sheet of cut glass as I sit admiring the view from my room’s veranda after a night of deep sleep. Last night, Edie, Alice, and I enjoyed a delicious dinner that included Caesar salad, sea bass, and 48-hour short rib, as well as a sharing of the kind of desserts it is impossible to pass up.

Our room has two bedrooms, a bathroom, and – in between them – a small living room with a writing desk, a drawer set, a wardrobe, a couch, and, mercifully, no TV. The room has a classic feel, simply attired yet beautiful in its restraint, with the silhouettes of tree branches on the patterned wallpaper reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy, and the dark wood bed frame hosting the kind of deeply inviting mattress that makes you loath to ever rise from it.

After a delicious breakfast, I take a class in archery. The shooting range is located a short walk from the hotel, beside a small copse of maples and pines. The instructor, an enthusiastic young man in dark glasses, walks us through the technique. The secret, he says, is to understand the bow’s height relative to the target. For a tall man like me, it’s necessary to tilt the bow down slightly to avoid shooting over the target, and to pull the string far back in order to release the bow’s full power.

After a few rounds of slightly wayward shooting, I’m finally getting the hang of it, and manage to shoot all three arrows inside the blue ring of the bullseye. The woman in the next lane calls out “Good shooting!” and I bow gratuitously before I realize she’s talking to the guy behind me who just shot three arrows inside orange.

A spa treatment like no other

Following the archery class, I met up with Edie for a facial treatment. Tiffany, the cosmetologist, works me over with a set of crystals that look like the kind of things Cate Blanchett’s Elf Queen might have kept in her powder room in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. There is a sculpting spoon made of rose quartz, a jade comb, and an ornate eye mask fashioned from the same white quartz found in the nearby Shawangunk Ridge.

The treatment takes place in the spa annex, which, besides the swimming pool, features saunas, steam rooms, outdoor mineral pools and a series of treatment rooms named in honor of local wildlife. I am in the “Bear” room, and after Tiffany has explained the purpose of each of the Elf Queen’s toolset, I am invited to relax on a heated recliner that is so comfortable I would probably feel I have had my money’s worth if I just lay here for an hour listening to Max Richter.

That said, the facial itself is exquisite and involves, by turns, the application of various lotions – massaged deftly into the skin – followed by the use of the crystals. Some are applied heated and I can feel the mineral’s warmth radiate luxuriously into my pores. Tiffany draws the jade comb back and forth along my jaw line, and as I sense the moist, smooth texture of its carved edge against me, I feel so relaxed it’s impossible to imagine that I am ever going to do anything other than just lie here and be pampered.

After the facial, I find Edie settled on a lounger on the outside terrace with a fragrant tea in hand. She is even more blown away by the experience than I am and vows to take better care of her skin in the future. I wish I could make the same promise, but I know myself too well at this point. I’m afraid it’s back to dish soap and water for my pores going forward. Having said that, I do think I’ll watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy again.

The final view

Before we leave, we walk around the lake for a better view of the hotel. We follow the trail above the cliffs to where you can see the impressive scale of the building and the full drama of its aspect.

“It looks like Hogwarts,” says Alice.

Or perhaps Hogwarts fused with one of those storied Alpine spa resorts that famous writers and Golden Age Hollywood stars used to retire to back in the day. We sit on a bench, happy and relaxed after two days of easy living. I ask Alice if she would like to live in a hotel. Unsurprisingly, she would.

“Why?” I ask.

“You could go to the pool whenever you want,” she says.

“It’d be nice to have someone make all your meals for you, wouldn’t it?” I add, forgetting that her mom and I already provide her with this service.

Shortly, we will descend from here and back to our real lives. But for now, we sit in the sunshine, taking in the view, basking in the afterglow of spa treatments and fine dining, enjoying the mountaintop fairy tale just a little while longer.

Photos courtesy of Mohonk Mountain House + Paul Willis

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