“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
“And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by….” – John Masefield, “Sea-Fever”
On March 26, the Delamar Hotel Collection held a press event to introduce its newest hotel, the Delamar Mystic, which opened Feb. 19 and marries modern amenities with the maritime heritage of the village and Charles Mallory, Delamar founder, owner and CEO.
The Delamar Mystic joins Delamar hotels in Greenwich, Southport, West Hartford and Traverse City, Michigan, as the collection celebrates its 25th anniversary in a big way: This spring will see the opening of the Delamar Westport while a sister property in Westport, The Inn at Longshore, undergoes an $8 million renovation and expansion, now slated for fall.
Mystic and the Mallorys
The three-floor, 27,000-square-foot hotel – which has 31 rooms and suites, a 2,600-square-foot ballroom, meeting and event spaces, a guest-only heated swimming pool and an outdoor patio and event lawn, along with La Plage Restaurant & Oyster Bar and wellness offerings through Cure Med Spa and Advantage Personal Training – has been designed to evoke the marine history of Mystic and Mallory’s family in less conventional ways by suggesting the home of a 19th-century shipbuilder. The present Charles Mallory comes from a long line of such shipbuilders, beginning with the Charles Mallory who arrived on Mystic’s shores in 1816, using a sailmaking apprenticeship as a springboard for building and investing in merchant ships; and his son, Charles Henry, who blended the expanding family business with a passion for yachts, which he raced in the 1850s.
The founding Mallorys’ august portraits greet you on your arrival, as does a sinuous, reef-llike Timorous Beasties wallpaper with a bespoke crab and lobster motif. Oil paintings and watercolors of 19th-century ships and other nautical scenes from Mallory’s art collection grace guest rooms and corridors, which also feature Schumacher wallpapers in blues and emerald green. Other touches, nodding to Mystic’s and the Mallorys’ global trade routes, are more unusual. An archival world map adorns the lobby ceiling while the elevator’s mosaic floor reproduces the face of a compass.
Custom, Victorian-tiered chandeliers of shimmering blue-green prisms in the lobby as well as the sconces in La Plage Restaurant & Oyster Bar hark back to a time when prisms refracted daylight on ships to illuminate life below deck. A trumeau mirror, crowned with a maritime painting, hangs above the fireplace in the lobby, which also displays the Juniper Books installation, whose spines form a whaling ship and a map of Mystic Seaport.
“My grandfather, great-uncle and father were all presidents of Mystic Seaport Museum, so this is particularly personal for me,” Mallory said in a statement. “I wanted the hotel to feel like it belonged to both the past and the present. Think of it as a respectful handshake between centuries.”
Jacques Pepin comes to the Delamar Greenwich Harbor
On Sunday, April 27th at 5:30 p.m., Mallory, Delamar Corporate Chef and Partner Frederic Kieffer and Franco-American chef – and longtime Madison, Connecticut, resident — Jacques Pépin will host a five-course seated dinner to honor Pépin’s contributions to French, American and Connecticut cuisine in his 90th year. (His actual birthday is Dec. 18.)
The personal chef of former French President Charles de Gaulle, who had led the Free French Forces against the Nazis in World War II, Pépin made a name for himself in the United States as both a food executive (directing research and development for Howard Johnson’s group of restaurants) and chef (the Manhattan soup and lunch counter La Potagerie) before a near-fatal car accident that permanently damaged his left arm led him to reinvent himself as a restaurant consultant (Windows on the World atop the former World Trade Center), cookbook author (“La Technique,” “La Methode”) and, above all, PBS chef-educator, often appearing with Julia Child or daughter Claudine Pépin. The Pépins, along with her husband, Rollie Wesen, created the Jacques Pepin Foundation in 2016 to provide grants, materials and instruction to community culinary programs that serve youths and adults who might have few opportunities to employment due to little education or training, homelessness, substance abuse or prior incarceration.
A portion of the dinner’s proceeds will support the Jacques Pépin Foundation. The cost is $550 per person. For reservations, call 203-661-4600.
In the wings — the Delamar Westport
The Pépin’s dinner is not the only Delamar-celebrity collaboration. The Delamar Westport, which opens in June, will feature the work of fashion and interior designer – and Westport resident – Christian Siriano, who brings his creativity to the hotel’s lobby and the “Siriano Suites’’ – three suites that include the 3,000-square-foot presidential suite.
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