This past weekend, my lovely wife NancyAnne and I got to spend time at one of our favorite places anywhere: the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. We went here on our honeymoon, and have returned on or about every Valentine’s Day ever since.
The hotel is named after Sylvia Beach, who owned and operated the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris between the World Wars. Ms. Beach was a literary titan, well-regarded in Left Bank literary circles. She published James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ernest Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems.
The hotel itself is a four-story wood frame building situated on a cliff overlooking the beach. It dates back to 1907, where it is one of the last remaining examples of the tourist building boom in Newport. It is located in the hip-n-funky Nye Beach neighborhood, home of many cool shops, restaurants and bookstores.
As a literary-themed hotel, all of the rooms are named and decorated after famous authors: we’ve stayed in the Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Ernest Hemingway and Colette rooms. There are also more whimsical rooms suitable for kids and families, including the Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling and Jules Verne rooms.
This year, we lucked out and managed to book three nights in our favorite room: the Mark Twain. This is definitely our favorite room for a variety of reasons: big, uber-comfortable bed, superlative ocean view, a fireplace and a claw-foot tub with a writing shelf to allow for cranking out a few pages while bathing.
Also, there’s a wonderful library on the top floor overlooking the beach that runs the length of the building. The view is fantastic, it’s scattered about with comfy chairs, and every night the hotel provides a cauldron of mulled wine. Also, there’s a great restaurant called Tables of Contents (nyuk). Breakfast for all guests, and the evenings they serve wonderful four-course meals. It’s group seating, so you will in all likelihood end up having to make engage in the Lost Art of Conversation with a stranger. (Unless you end up to a non-responsive software engineer from Hillsboro, like I did.)
So what did we do? We read. A lot. The hotel i conducive to that: no TV, no phones, no WiFi. No problem. Besides, no one goes to the Oregon coast in February with reasonable expectations of spending a lot of time outdoors. Saturday it rained all day, but we were more than content to stay in the room and read, and feed wood into the fireplace. It was wonderful to curl up by the fire and read while listening to the spack-spack of the winter rain on the windowpane.
Sunday, it cleared up a bit, and we wandered around the Nye Beach neighborhood, checking out new places and old favorites. We also went down to the Bayfront area, which is a really interesting combination of working fishing port and seaside tourist area. We came back to a stunning sunset:
As always, this was an excellent getaway, and we are thankful to the people at the SBH for being so gracious and running such an excellent literary hotel.