Omni Mount Washington Resort

The Hotel

The Mount Washington Hotel opened on July 28, 1902 as Joseph Stickney's gift to the Gilded Age: a 200-room Spanish-Renaissance Revival grand hotel on 10,000 forested acres at the foot of the highest peak in the northeastern United States, the architectural commission of New York's Charles Alling Gifford, with the red roof and the white-stucco exterior set against the Presidential Range. The hotel was the most expensive grand resort in New England at its opening and one of the last great White Mountains hotels of the late nineteenth-century resort era; it has operated continuously every summer and (since 1999) every winter since.

The hotel's defining historical chapter is the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference of July 1944. For three weeks in the closing summer of the war, 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered in the Gold Room and on the colonnaded veranda to draft the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). The Bretton Woods Agreement that emerged from those rooms set the dollar-gold standard that anchored the post-war financial order until 1971. The Gold Room is preserved in its original 1902 configuration; the wood-paneled corridor outside is hung with the conference photography. Guests stay in rooms named for the conference delegations.

Omni Hotels & Resorts acquired the property in 2015 and has continued the renovation programme begun by the prior ownership: a four-storey 60,000-square-foot Presidential Wing addition completed in 2009 added 69 contemporary guestrooms, a 25,000-square-foot Mount Washington Spa with garden conservatory, and a 25,000-square-foot conference centre. The historic hotel block retains 178 original guestrooms and 22 suites, all individually configured to the 1902 floor-plate (no two are alike); the modern Presidential Wing rooms run a contemporary New England palette with the same Presidential-Range view from the upper floors. The property's 6,500 acres of golf, ski, and trail land include the 18-hole Mount Washington Course (designed by Donald Ross in 1915) and the Bretton Woods Ski Area, the largest ski mountain in New Hampshire, accessed by an on-site shuttle.

The grand-resort programme runs the full New England calendar: 25,000-square-foot spa with twenty-five treatment rooms and a year-round mineral-water indoor pool; two championship golf courses; a tennis programme with eight courts; ski-in at Bretton Woods with 464 acres of terrain; a 36-mile cross-country and snowshoe network; the dog-sled, the canopy tour, the falconry programme. Dining occupies five outlets, the Main Dining Room with the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the Presidential Range (jacket required at dinner), Stickney's, Rosebrook Bar, Princess Lounge, and the historic Bretton Arms Inn dining room across the property. The hotel runs at 90 percent occupancy from late June through Columbus Day and again from December 22 through March 15; the value windows are May (between mud season and summer), November, and early December.

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