Voted Best Boutique Hotel in Best of Cleveland 2026

Cleveland Magazine announces the 2026 winners in its October issue and at the Best of Cleveland party on October 15 at the Great Lakes Science Center.

Best of Cleveland is a reader vote. After a nomination round, readers voted through July 31, and we were a top-five finalist in four categories: Best Winery, Best Boutique Hotel, Best Patio and Cleveland Hot Spot. We wrote about what each of those categories means to us when the finalists were announced. Best Boutique Hotel is the one we won.

It is our second Best of Cleveland award. In 2024, Cleveland Magazine named us Best Boutique Winery.

Thank you to everyone who voted, and to every guest who has stayed with us since the inn opened in 2024.

What the award is for

The inn is eight rooms in our mansion in Madison, Ohio, the same house as our restaurant and wine bar on the Lake Erie shore. It is adults only. Every room has a king or queen bed, a private bath and a view of the lake.

The house took our family eight years to finish. When we bought it, the outside was largely built but the inside had never been completed, and the original architectural drawings had been lost in a county flood, so the rooms were measured and mapped by hand before work could start. The slate on the roof came from a church in Pennsylvania. Local tradespeople did the specialist work, and during the pandemic much of the construction became the family's own job.

We kept the inn small on purpose. Eight rooms is a number our family can look after properly.

What a stay includes

• Breakfast cooked to order each morning in the breakfast room, with coffee and fresh juice.

• A heated pool and hot tub above the lake for inn guests, May through November, weather permitting.

• Dinner downstairs. Chef Jeff Gable's restaurant serves lunch and dinner Wednesday through Sunday. Reserve a table separately from your room.

• Our own wine. The wine bar pours our estate wines. The 2022 Estate Cabernet Franc won Double Gold at the 2025 Ohio Wine Competition.

Check-in is at 4 p.m. and checkout at 11 a.m. A two-night minimum applies in summer only.

A boutique hotel near Cleveland, not in it

If you are looking for a boutique hotel downtown, we are not it. We are in Madison, about 45 minutes east of downtown Cleveland on Lake Erie, in the Grand River Valley wine country. It suits a night away from the city: dinner and a bottle of wine without a drive home, a morning by the lake, and an afternoon at the wineries nearby.

For planning the rest of the trip, our Grand River Valley winery map has ten day trips, and our Geneva-on-the-Lake guide covers the resort town 15 minutes east.

Book a room

You can see every room on our rooms page and check dates and rates on our stay page. For dinner, book a table.

Other recognition for the estate: Cleveland Magazine named Vincent William Best View in its 2026 Best of the East awards, and Lake Erie Living included the inn in its 2025 guide to the top 25 hotels and resorts on Lake Erie.