A Next Chapter in Historic Hospitality
Rafe Churchill '91 discusses his latest venture, Place in Mind, a hotelier dedicated to resurrecting historically unique properties that recall a life well lived in a place well loved.
In January 2025, Heide and I acquired a historic Seminary in Old Bennington, Vermont. At the time, both of our kids were attending Bennington College. It was at Bennington where I spent my college years as an architecture and sculpture student in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Seminary was both a place to visit while our children were in school and a natural way for me to deepen an ongoing relationship with the College, its alumni, and its Trustees.
Now in my late 50s, after three decades of designing and building across both historic renovations and ground-up new construction, and co-founding a successful architecture and interior design firm Hendricks Churchill, I found myself searching for something more accessible, more enduring, and ultimately something that could define my legacy and allow me be the person I believe I was meant to be. Designing new homes, even those clearly influenced by historic buildings, no longer held the same thrill. What I loved were historic buildings, and I wanted to save them. Not one at a time, but at scale. I don’t regret my thirty years of working in a competitive and demanding environment, instead I consider it my training for what I was meant to do.
The Seminary changed me and would define this next chapter. As with most historic structures, there is a particular unshakeable feeling when inside. The Seminary, though worn from years of use, still held its spirit: a great room lined floor to ceiling with old books, traces of Vermont history, and layers of Williams College ephemera left behind by a family of writers who had retreated there for more than sixty years. We purchased it furnished, a baby grand player piano still in place, everything intact, as if time had simply paused.
|
I invited Hendricks Churchill’s Managing Director, Casey Sunderland, to see and experience the property. Together, we realized this building was unique. It felt different. It didn’t feel like a private residence, but like a place meant to be shared. This was hospitality. Casey, a New England native, spent nearly a decade in film at Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles. Despite a generational divide of nearly a quarter century, we shared a passion for historic buildings and design—we quickly became partners in a new endeavor. That divide became an advantage, allowing us not only to preserve these buildings, but to make them resonate with a younger generation of design and cultural enthusiasts. To help execute this vision, Casey and I partnered with Terry Sanford, former Managing Partner of Blue Flag Capital and Co-Founder of Faraway Hotels and currently CIO of PropCo US, a leading hospitality investment platform. Hospitality offered a way to preserve these historic buildings, share these spaces, and extend the singular Hendricks Churchill aesthetic to a wider audience, while using a hospitality model to sustain them. At its core, we follow a simple principle, one that may seem contrarian to the world that is hospitality: preservation first, hospitality second. Our hospitality brand was born from the discovery of a small journal at The Seminary. On the first page was a single paragraph, the beginning of an unfinished story. It told of a young woman arriving at dusk with the peculiar feeling that the house already knew her. That fragment would become the spirit and foundation of an entirely original historic hospitality concept, Place in Mind. Place in Mind is a hotelier rooted in place and conjured in mind. We resurrect historically unique properties that recall a life well lived in a place well loved. Our hospitality experiences would be shaped, and ultimately led, by the historic buildings themselves. Through a design lens informed by the physical record of lived human experience–scratched floorboards, worn fireplace hearths, hand-troweled plaster, original artwork and vintage furniture-and a deep reverence for story and setting, Place in Mind offers guests a transportive experience: entirely authentic, rooted and nostalgic. 
|