Litchfield County has long been the preferred home-away-from-home for many chic New Yorkers, including Diane von Furstenberg, Wes Gordon, and Oscar and Annette de la Renta, but the hotel offering has been fairly limited. That is slowly starting to change, opening up the area to more and more visitors. Earlier this summer, Lost Fox Inn opened from the Foxfire Mountain House team; next spring, nearby Troutbeck will open Belden House & Mews; and this September, the Salt Hotels team has turned the town of Litchfield’s historical courthouse into a boutique hotel, restaurant and rooftop bar, called The Abner.
The courthouse closed in 2017, and a deed search on the building revealed that the property reverted back to six of the original landowners. Of those, only one family had maintained the rights through the generations, meaning one gentleman out on the West Coast found himself the rightful heir to an old courthouse in Connecticut.
“He ended up selling it to the Litchfield Preservation Trust for $300,000, which is well under market value, and they had wanted to turn it into a town hall,” explains Kevin O’Shea, one half of the Salt Hotels duo. “The problem was that the town couldn’t really afford it. It needed so much work to get up to code and it was starting to fall into disrepair.”
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Together with his partner David Bowd, the team was contacted to come tour the space.
“Kevin’s always said that we’re caretakers of these beautiful old buildings. We love taking these historic buildings and giving them back life and restoring them back to their former glory and giving them a purpose and use again,” Bowd says. “With The Abner, the building had been empty for just over three years when we toured it for the first time, and from closing to opening was almost seven years. For me, it was the process of bringing people back into a building that most people, if they’d been in it, wasn’t for the best reasons with it being a courthouse, and allowing it to become part of the town again.”
The building came with all sorts of historical parameters that made turning it from a municipal building into a luxury hotel rather difficult — or “a fun challenge,” says O’Shea. The main 1888 courtroom had to be left intact, which is where they decided to put the restaurant. They wanted to keep as many details from the courthouse as possible, including reworking a judge’s bench into a reception desk.
The hotel has a partnership on art with Bookstein Projects out of New York. The gallery’s founder Lori Bookstein has owned a home in Litchfield for 40 years, and in fact just bought a new house around the corner from The Abner. She and O’Shea collaborated together on the art in the hotel’s public spaces, which is on long-term loan and is available for purchase.
The property’s restaurant, fittingly called the Courtroom, serves modern-day tavern fare from local chef Michael Alfeld.
“We felt that this space, the volume of this space, really deserved to have something quite special in it, but that wasn’t too fussy,” Bowd says. “The first few days of service have shown the locals are really excited by that and its accessibility.”
The hotel will also house a space done in partnership with the Litchfield Historical Society as a museum of the building’s history, protecting the history even as the town opens up to more visitors.
“I think it is going to be a very popular piece of telling the story of this beautiful 240-year-old building,” Bowd says.
