The Inn at Longshore has hosted enough celebrations to fill a book. For generations of Westport families, it has been the setting for weddings, parties, and afternoons by the water. Its renovation came with an unusual challenge: how do you make a place feel new when so many people already feel it belongs to them?
Interior designer Ryann Swan began by looking backward. Once the estate of financier Frederick E. Lewis, Longshore became a beach and country club in 1929.
The Town of Westport acquired the property in 1960.
Swan and her team consulted local histories, along with books on Connecticut Valley furniture and New England wallpaper, before designing the Inn’s interiors.
“We truly felt like we were entrusted with a great responsibility to restore the Inn to its former glory rather than write a new narrative,” Swan says.
The house offered a few clues of its own. In The Salon, one of the bridal suites, the team discovered fragments of bordered marquetry flooring. The floor was too damaged to save, but its wood tones inspired the stain used throughout the Inn and the new marquetry inlay in the lobby. Swan also designed the lobby wallcovering around the seagrasses of the Connecticut coast, arranging them in a pattern informed by historic decorative motifs.
“We truly felt like we were entrusted with a great responsibility to restore the Inn to its former glory rather than write a new narrative.” – Ryann Swan
Guests now enter through a relocated main entrance, with a view of the water ahead of them. It is a small change with a considerable payoff: Longshore’s setting becomes part of the welcome.
The ballroom yielded another surprise. When the ceiling was opened, the team found evidence that the room had once been a patio at the back of the house, complete with a former patio ceiling painted haint blue. They kept the ceiling pitched rather than leveling it, preserving a hint of that earlier life.
New trim, custom chandeliers, herringbone wood flooring, and a grand bar have made the room ready for its next round of celebrations.
Swan has a family memory tied to the ballroom. Her father spent part of his youth in Westport and remembers doing junior lifeguard training out of the space. It is hard to imagine a better reminder that Longshore has meant different things to different people over the years.
Its Jazz Age associations gave Swan another thread to follow.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived nearby and moved in the same social world as Lewis and his guests. Rather than attempt a 1920s recreation, Swan drew on the period’s decorative language: botanical forms associated with Art Nouveau and the more structured geometry of Art Deco appear in lighting and architectural details.
“There is something about a wonderful party that always feels a little bit like the Roaring Twenties,” she says, recalling the champagne, the beautiful clothes, and the guests who stay longer than they planned.
Upstairs, the 14 guest rooms and suites resist a standard hotel formula. Some have dormers; others offer generous stretches of wall for wallpaper. Their proportions and views differ, so Swan gave each room its own combination of color, pattern, and furnishings. Two suites were designed in partnership with Serena & Lily.
She also thought about what happens after a guest puts down a suitcase. Each room has a comfortable place to sit and write, a full-length mirror, and enough vanity space to spread out. In the Gatsby Suite, a floating makeup counter makes getting ready for the evening part of the pleasure. Hand-painted room numbers, brass keys, and historic photographs carry the house’s character into smaller moments.
In the breakfast room, custom Delft tiles nod to Fairfield County’s early Dutch settlers. The walls change with the light, reading dusty blue in the morning and steely gray by candlelight.
Swan wanted the room to feel as inviting on a snowy evening beside the Saugatuck as it does on a summer morning.
That may be Longshore’s greatest strength after the renovation.
It still feels like the house Westport knows, with enough new detail to make a return visit feel like a discovery.
“There is something about a wonderful party that always feels a little bit like the Roaring Twenties: the champagne, the beautiful clothes, everyone lingering longer than they intended.” – Ryann Swan
