In the historic Moravian village of Hope, an old millrace leaves a small millpond and flows through a chasm of slate toward a 1769 stone gristmill, which once supplied flour to Washington’s troops and is now an inn. When you enter its gorgeous foyer, you can look down a story and a halfat the skeleton of the old wheel and walk downstairs between stone walls to see where the millrace once ran (in summer, a little water still flows in the channel). The spot now serves as the inn’s wine cellar. Though the inn complex also includes two other Colonial buildings used for lodging, as well as antiques and gift shops, the focus is on the gristmill with its guest rooms, tavern, and gourmet restaurant. The architecture is stunning, from the bottom-floor tavern, with its huge walk-in fireplace, cage bar, and flour chute, to the top floor’s bedrooms, where cathedral ceilings reveal the enormous tim-bers of the roof. The building’s beams and wide-board floors have been preserved throughout.
The gristmill bedrooms have Shaker reproductions; elsewhere there are regional antiques made in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The six-bedroom Millrace House, a frame building that was the miller’s dwelling, has more formal furnishings and a parlor with a fireplace. Its bedrooms and the two in the Stone Cottage have collections of Queen Anne, Chippendale, and Sheraton pieces. Each of the Stone Cottage bedrooms (one upstairs and one down) has its own entrance, and they are prized for romantic seclusion. Previous inn guests have included Nick Nolte, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoff-man, and Michael Feinstein.
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