ROSE DOYLEstays at the Inn at Ellis Square, in Savannah.
ARRIVING IN THE US city of Savannah by train set the tone for times to come at the Inn at Ellis Square. The Amtrak, after the seven-hour journey from Florida, slipped into the station, politely taking its time under an evening sky the colour of dark honey.
Decked out by trees hung with Spanish moss, the station has only been there since 1962, but, like everywhere else in Savannah, it has taken on the Georgia city’s time-honoured qualities of ease and civility, grace and elegance. I could go on. I was very taken by Savannah.
When we got to our hotel, after a good-humoured, 15-minute taxi drive costing just $10 (€7), I was also taken by the Inn at Ellis Square. Solidly reassuring in red brick, with the additional comfort of a curbside swimming pool, it’s as central to Savannah sights and activities as you could want.
The pool has rules that forbid swimming during heavy rain, or in thunder and lightning. This is the subtropical south, after all, with hot summers and seasonal offerings of tornadoes, hurricanes and thunderstorms. Spitting, spouting of water and blowing of noses are also forbidden – young swimmers are young swimmers, even in the gracious south.
And grace, helped by a bit of heritage, comes easily to the hotel’s dark-wood, swagged-curtain interior. Recently renovated, the inn is housed in what used be the Guckenheimer Building, which was built around 1851.
The renovation has created 252 rooms with a low-key swank about them, public areas where shining plants sit alongside armchairs, and corridors with incongruous, darkly patterned wool carpeting. It’s an easy place to be, the sort of hotel that quietly and efficiently has you in your room in no time.
Rooms, in our case. We’d booked a suite, part of an online deal, which transpired as separate living room and bedroom, with a good-sized bathroom between and all of the niceties: coffee-maker, fridge, microwave, free Wi-Fi and air conditioning that even I was able to control. There were a couple of plasma TVs, too, and, in a subdued burgundy decor, a great degree of restful repose.
But you can have too much of a good thing, so we hit the streets and walked, and walked, under oaks a-droop with curtains of Spanish moss, past houses neogothic and colonial, through squares filled with greenery and whispers.
When we came to a cemetery and turned back for the hotel we found ourselves lost – no joke on a dark night with nobody around in a city immortalised, never more worryingly, by John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a spookily uneasy hour, or more, before we found our way back.
If the people who work there are the measure of a hotel, then Ms Laura, on the concierge desk, considerably ups the ante for the Inn at Ellis Square. A life force to be reckoned with, she sat at her desk the next morning sorting guests and their plans, and making the impossible possible. She’s done the lot herself, she said, from “huntin’ alligators to birdwatching. Travelled the Amazon, too. And I’m not through yet. Don’t want to be 100 and rottin’, and for there to be things I haven’t done. You gotta live.”
She’s the best hotel concierge I’ve come across.
Ellis Square used be the site of the city market, where farmers and others came to sell until it was demolished, in 1954. These days, just across the road, there is a pedestrianised, arty City Market, full of galleries and studios, restaurants, shops and horse-drawn carriages on city tours. River Street, across the road from the back of the hotel, is livelier. The Savannah river was once the main route for the south’s cotton industry, and it remains busy with international shipping.
Cobbled River Street has a buzz to it, as well as shops and eateries and people willing to tell you how it was Irish emigrants who laid the cobbles here, as the plantation owners “thought their slaves too valuable for such work”. They’ll tell you, too, that 40 per cent of Savannah’s population is of Irish descent and remind you that Savannah’s St Patrick’s Day parade is the second-biggest in the US.
Once in town, however, and certainly once away from the reassurance of the Inn at Ellis Square, it’s best to remember that things are not always what they seem in Savannah. Spanish moss, for instance, is neither moss nor Spanish. It’s just an air-feeding plant.
WhereThe Inn at Ellis Square, 201 West Bay Street, Savannah, Georgia, 00-1-912-236-4440, innatellissquare.com.
WhatThree-star hotel in a restored 150-year-old building.
Rooms252. Suites also available with separate living room and bedroom. All are non-smoking, and all have free Wi-Fi.
RatesExpect to pay from $127 (€87) for a double or from $143 (€98) for a suite.
Restaurants and barsBreakfast room, serving continental buffet; lounge bar.
Child-friendlinessDefinitely child- and family-friendly; regularly caters for scout groups.
AmenitiesOutdoor pool. Full fitness centre. Business centre.