Story & Photographs reprinted with permission from the pages of The Inn Crowd published by Monacelli
T HE INN AT BURKLYN East Burke, Vermont
The first time Marci and Jim Crone saw Burklyn Hall, it was via text.“ I found your house,” the message read, along with a picture of a stately Colonial Revival mansion perched atop a rolling Vermont hill.
It was a recurring joke between Marci and her cousin, with whom she had grown up on the East Coast. Marci had since found her way to California, where she and Jim had it all: a success- ful commercial real estate business, five children, six grandchildren, and a beautiful home where the family gathered at least once a week for big dinners or barbecues. Still, Marci had always fantasized about a return to her native coast.
She showed the listing to Jim.“ It’ s pretty,” he agreed.“ But I’ m not moving to Vermont.” Anyway, they agreed, a thirty-five-room house on eighty-six acres was too much house for them.
And that was that. Or so Marci thought.
Two weeks later, Jim called her from work.“ He told me to pack for the weekend— we were getting on a plane,” she recalls.“ I said,‘ I’ m going to need more information than that.’” Jim invited her to his office, where a photo of Burklyn was displayed on a big presentation screen.“ I bought it!” he said.“ We’ re going out there this weekend to see it.” It was all so romantic.
Well, says Jim, it wasn’ t only romance that inspired the sudden change of heart.“ It was a tax exchange,” he explains, referencing an IRS rule that allows investors to forgo capital gains payments when they apply the profits from one property to the purchase of another. Jim had recently sold a building and needed to quickly channel the proceeds into a new venture. Marci’ s fateful text had arrived at just the right time.
Never mind the business details, Burklyn was theirs if they wanted it. They had ten days to sign the paperwork or back out of the deal. So they hopped on the next flight to Burlington and drove the two hours through rambling farmland, past glassy lakes and boreal forests, to the great house on the hill. It had been built in 1908 by Elmer Darling, a local aristocrat who made his fortune operating New York City’ s Fifth Avenue Hotel(“ the Plaza of the time,” says Marci). As one of Vermont’ s most prominent citizens, he was integral to bringing the area its first hydroelectric power plant. In his Vermont home, he had duplicated many of his enterprises’ luxuries and innovations, including an elevator( one of the state’ s first) and a high-tech power grid that operated on both gas and newfangled electric. Ornate
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