Photography By Celia Pearson
My husband, Kevin, and I were on our way home from Ocean City, where it had happened to be Delmarva Bike Week. What seemed like thousands upon thousands of motorcycles sputtering their way up and down Coastal Highway punctuated the calm of our only beach getaway of the season. The constant cacophony made our stretch-out-the-vacation-to-one-more-day visit to the elegant Inn at 30 Maryland in Annapolis even more civilized.
he “Maryland” in the name is Maryland Avenue, a quaint, brick-paved street filled with small shops and individual homes. It’s nestled between Prince George and King George streets, a short block-and-a-half from the State House in one direction and St. John’s College in the other. The three-story Victorian inn sits in the middle of its block; like the street, it, too, is red brick, with a fine front porch complete with two benches, hanging pots of red geraniums, and a resplendent yellow hibiscus in full bloom. (The front gets transformed as appropriate through the seasons, with garland and lights in traditional Annapolis fashion for the holidays.)
We found out that “gardener” is only one of the roles innkeeper Robert Dunn juggles, as he welcomed us into the inn and introduced us to mother-in-law, Brenda Gnap, who helps run the inn, and his second-baseman son, Kelly, who had just returned from a Little League game. Robert, his wife, Michele, and Kelly live on the top floor of the three- story building. Dunn is also the inn’s chef, decorator, acquisition librarian, and resident rock’n’roll expert. (Ask him his opinion of the best albums of the nineties, a question he’s been pondering for a while.)
Both his professionalism and his laid-back personality belie his youth—he’s a quite young-looking thirty-six. With ten-plus years working in the kitchens of restaurants, hotels, and corporate estates, Dunn is no novice to hospitality.
The brief tour commenced as soon as we brought in our bags; Dunn pointed out the bistro area on the first floor, a bright, striped-wallpaper room with two small tables, and a sideboard with water, sodas, ice, and glasses (in the morning, guests can nibble on continental breakfast items such as breads, fruit, and cereal before the dining room opens at eight).
We continued into the formal gold and burgundy dining room, with its hardwood floors and the well-stocked library full of paperback thrillers (courtesy of Dunn’s dad), high-end cookbooks, and the Rolling Stone Guide to Rock’n’Roll, which accompanied me to our huge, two-room suite for further study. Dunn estimates that the inn was built “firmly in the end of the Victorian era,” though during renovation, he found “J.L. Amos 1892” written in pencil under a removed windowsill in one of the back bedrooms. He supposes the house was finished around this time. Most recently, the building was owned by a big game hunter with a penchant for displaying his furry trophy heads; it has since undergone extensive renovation.
The inn’s tagline, “a stately Queen Anne Victorian with a distinctly modern sensibility,” is appropriate, and this balance of old and new is felt throughout, from the antiques procured from consignment shops and relatives’ homes to the up-to-date stylish bathrooms. “We really try to mix the styles of furniture,” says Dunn, who opened the inn last October. “And if you mix them well enough, it works.”
Our suite was a good example.
The sitting room contained a twin trundle daybed covered with a handsome paisley coverlet in russet tones and piled high with pillows. There was also a small refrigerator and two wing chairs, upholstered in a playful exotic bird print, which originally belonged to Dunn’s parents. Abundant, louvered-shuttered windows in the sitting room and bedroom make the twelve-foot-high pale lemon walls seem to glow softly, even in the late-afternoon sunlight.
The bedroom portion held an antique vanity with a mirror and giant reproduction wardrobe holding a television. The centerpiece of the suite, however, was the bed, a king-sized French Provincial-style affair dressed in black and white toile—and soft enough for any princess to feel a pea hidden under the mattress. I had recently stayed in a major chain hotel which prides itself on its bedding—The Inn at 30 Maryland gives them serious competition. “We did a lot of research on bedding,” Brenda explains, “Because the inn experience is about bed and breakfast.” “Good bed, good linens, good breakfast,” Robert adds.
Two things I always get excited about when I stay at a bed and breakfast are a good library and a good bathtub. I had already scavenged the library and was tickled with my findings, but the bathroom made my earlier treasure seem paltry.
Dunn renovated all the bathrooms, and they are sleek visions of black and white, with deep soaking tubs and gleaming pewter-colored fixtures. Some rooms, like ours, have long black marble counters; others have gleaming white pedestal sinks. Our bathroom had French doors that lead out to a rooftop porch. All rooms but one have bathtubs.
The inn’s other four rooms vary in size and décor. Room 35, which overlooks the historic Chase-Lloyd House gardens next door, is large enough to accommodate Dunn’s parents’ vintage Danish bedroom set, which looks surprisingly classic covered in a magnolia-patterned bedspread in this garden-green painted room.
Room 32, however, is snug, though the wide, navy-striped wall-paper, white linens, and tall bay windows give the illusion of more space (and it overlooks the State House dome). We were impressed by the padded headboard in Room 34 (the newest addition), which Robert and Michelle built themselves and upholstered in a fashionable pale blue and chocolate-brown pineapple print. And we imagined ourselves settling in very comfortably in the couple’s favorite room, Room 33, a cozy space done in red pinstripes and roses, with a red-and-white quilt and Robert’s grandfather’s wardrobe.
After washing up, Kevin and I took a short stroll down to the City Dock to catch a glimpse of the water and then looped back to Maryland Avenue for a dinner of lamb chops, shepherd’s pie, and a couple pints of tasty ales at Galway Bay, one of the city’s many Irish pubs.
We had more choices to make at breakfast the next morning. Waiting at our cloth-covered table for two were menus offering eggs any style, French toast, an omelet with feta and spinach, and bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, and toast. I had the tasty, refreshingly not-too-sweet French toast garnished with fresh fruit, and Kevin very much enjoyed the omelet, which came with a grilled tomato.
The dining room is another example of how Dunn’s mix-and-match aesthetic works. Despite five different dining tables with different but matching chairs and mismatched silver and china, the overall effect of the dining room was pure elegance. The only spot of incongruity were the black plastic caddies holding jelly and sugar packets.
One of the concerns guests have with bed and breakfasts, Dunn explains, is “consistency.” “People don’t know what kind of place they’re walking into, and they worry,” he says, adding, “We want to be enough like a boutique hotel without losing the sense of being owner-operated.” No problem there; in a short time, the Inn at 30 Maryland has done just that.
Mary Zajac writes from Baltimore and enjoys getting away to inns.
The Inn at 30 Maryland
30 Maryland Ave., Annapolis
410-263-9797 or http://www.30maryland.com
Rates: $175-$280 per night
