VERGENNES, Vermont– Growing up on their family’s resort, the Basin Harbor Club, set against Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks just across the water, it is little wonder that siblings Pennie Beach and Bob Beach Jr. decided to join the family business.
Pennie and Bob Beach Jr., fourth-generation hosts—along with Pennie’s daughter, Sarah Morris, the fifth-generation host and director of sales—are the latest members of the Beach family to oversee the Basin Harbor Club, a tradition that extends back to the late 1800s. The New England Inns and Resorts Association in October named the Beach family Masters of New England Innkeeping.
“It’s a great honor for us,” Pennie Beach said of the title.
A history of hospitality
In 1882, the Beach’s great-great-aunt Ardelia Beach through a tax sale bought 200 acres of land where the Basin Harbor Club currently resides. She had been teaching in Iowa and moved back east to take over the property, which was a working farm complete with cows, pigs, chickens and sheep. Ardelia Beach wrote to friends and family that she would turn the property into a resort, which she did by 1886. Her resort welcomed summer boarders as they arrived by steamboats on nearby Lake Champlain and the New York railroads.
“My grandfather Allen Penfield Beach was hired as the helper, the hired man, the summer of 1909,” Pennie Beach said. “He loved it. He had grown up on a farm two miles away. He loved the people and the aspects of the business.”
When Ardelia passed away suddenly in 1909, Allen, her nephew, convinced his father to buy out Ardelia’s widower and operate the farm and resort. As time went on, the resort grew in popularity, and soon its 40 rooms couldn’t keep up with demand. The Beaches built tent platforms, which were later replaced with cottages.
The resort now has 74 cottages along with the homestead and can accommodate close to 400 people when it’s full with cribs and cots, Morris said. The homestead and lodge are original to the site, she said, but they have changed over the years.
The main lodge had close to 40 rooms when it was a three-story structure, according to Morris, and it had a communal bathroom in the hall. The rooms had twin-sized beds or smaller. Now the lodge has 12 rooms with two suites, increasing the room sizes with added living rooms in some suites.
All about family
Pennie Beach was 13 years old when she started working at the Basin Harbor Club.
“Over the years, I’ve done everything from work at the gift shop to the riding stable in the ’50s to reservations and sales,” she said. “In 1990, Bob and I bought out the rest of the family and became co-GMs.”
Although their duties overlap some, they do have some dedicated responsibilities. Bob Beach Jr. oversees most of the buildings and grounds, from the resort’s 700 acres, 110 buildings and the water and wastewater operations. Pennie Beach handles general operations.
“We are unique among siblings who work in a busy industry,” she said. “We’re like old married people. We finish each other sentences. It’s a very harmonious relationship.”
At the time, Morris and her older brother were the first children born to the Beach family in 40 years, she said. As a result, her family renewed its children’s program as she and her cousins grew up, putting playgrounds and other places on the property and creating age-based crafts and activities.
It’s through their children that many of the guests have gotten to know each other, Pennie Beach said, making the return every summer their “nonfamily reunions.”
“They leave a reservation when they leave for the following year, which is pretty cool,” she said. “We have a return rate of about 50% each July and August.”
Long-time guests have a perceived ownership, she said. There are guests who stay in the same cottage each year, she said.
“If they have a favorite lamp, and we move it, we hear about it,” Pennie Beach said. “People are very invested in what we’re doing here. It’s a wonderful thing. It makes us feel very special.”
One family in particular began staying at the Basin Harbor Club when the matriarch of the family stayed with her family in the 1930s.
“We’re very proud of that connection,” Pennie Beach said. “We feel that everybody who comes here becomes part of the Basin Harbor family.”
That extends to the resort’s staff, she said. There are 300 staff members from when the property opens in early May to when it closes in late October, she said. The staff has a 50% return rate, she said, so there are plenty of experienced employees who can help train new members.
“If you’re here working with us, you’re part of the family,” Pennie Beach said.
Keeping traditions alive
There are no TVs in most of the guestrooms, and many guests like it that way, Pennie Beach said. There are TVs in certain locations, she said, and there is Wi-Fi available for those who need a fix, but the idea is to help people disconnect.
“It helps people relax, to take in a sense of place,” Morris said. “They can connect with the outside world. The lodging experience is not meant to be watching HBO in the evenings. Rising and setting with the sun, watching the lake, reading a book, spending time with family.”
The Basin Harbor Club offers three dining options, Pennie Beach said, two of which are casual and one that is more formal. The property has had a long-standing tradition of having people dress for dinner, with coat and tie and dresses, she said, but there also has been growing pressure in the industry to be more casual in the dining room.
“A few years ago, we stopped requesting ties for gentlemen, but more than half wear them anyway,” she said.
Many guests are looking for the more traditional dinners they remember, Morris said. While the formal dining experience is geared more toward guests aged 12 and older, she’s seen much younger children accompany their parents.
“The environment of a 7-year-old in a button-down shirt with a blazer sitting through a multicourse dinner with his grandparents, talking about anything but the electronic in his pocket, is an invaluable experience,” Morris said. “People see that and desperately want us to maintain that for the next generation.”