The Writing Room

Summary: A queen room on the second floor with pine furniture, a writing desk, three large windows, and antique books. The bathroom isn’t en suite – access is through the hall – and it may be shared with one other set of guests. However, the bathroom is quite large, with a heated tile floor, vintage fixtures, massive clawfoot tub, and an exposed brick chimney.

This room may be combined with the Maid’s Room across the hall for parties that want two adjacent bedrooms.

Features: The Writing Room is a unique octagonal-shaped bedroom with a queen bed, one bedside table, two large pine dressers, and an oak writing desk in front of the three floor-to-ceiling windows. There’s an internet-connected HDTV with a Roku interface and access to Netflix and other internet channels. The room is decorated throughout with several early- and mid-20th-century books. Although the dresser has plenty of available drawers, there's no wardrobe for hanging clothes. The bathroom is shared with the nearby Maid’s Room, and must be accessed through the hallway. It’s large – nearly 95 sq ft/9 sq m – and has a huge clawfoot tub with shower, original 19th-century porcelain sink, oversize toilet, exposed brick chimney, reproduction light fixtures, and heated mosaic tile floor. The trim in the bathroom is currently under restoration. Because bathroom access is through the hall, soundproofing on the second floor is minimal, and since the Writing Room is near the central staircase, it is perhaps our least private guest room. However, it usually has our lowest nightly rate.

Groups: The Writing Room can be paired with the Maids Room across the hall to create a two-room suite suitable for four or five guests. The Maid’s Room is a queen room with antique furniture from the 1870s, an internet-connected cable television, and two windows that face a meadow and Mount Moriah Cemetery. 

Light: The three large windows in the Writing Room face east, and get a lot of direct light after the sun gets above the mountains in the morning. The views look up to a neighboring house built in the 1880s, which has a natural stone retaining wall, vintage wooden well, and a wooden barn with cyanide-lid roof. From here, it’s possible to see the downhill boundary of Mount Moriah Cemetery, where Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are buried.

History: This room was designed for the son and daughter of H.B. Wardman, the retiring hardware merchant who built the house in 1899. His children were teenagers at the time, and likely didn’t live in the room for long before they graduated high school and traveled west to Arizona and California. The bathroom across the hall was the only full bathroom constructed in the house in 1899, and would have been shared by the entire family. The large clawfoot tub and sink are probably original to the house, while the lights and toilet are reproductions. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom would have had a fir floor. The original floor had significant damage when the innkeepers moved in, and it was replaced with the current unsealed ceramic tile floor in 2011. The pattern and color palette were based on designs from the period. While the center tiles were laid down in prefabricated sheets, the tiles in the border were laid individually by hand.

We called this room the Nursery for several years because of its history as a children’s bedroom, but we renamed it the Writing Room in honor of our friend Megan Phelps-Roper. Shortly after her escape from the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan and her sister Grace came to the 1899 Inn in December 2012. Megan wrote portions of her book, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, in this room.