LODGING: The Inn at Hudson

It takes hours of makeup to transform Fred Flintstone into this ravishing creature,” says Dini Lamot, pointing to a poster advertising an upcoming performance by his alter ego, a chanteuse named Musty Chiffon. And with that he returns to reciting the breakfast menu for guests seated in the ornate dining room beneath a plaster frieze of birds and vines.

Lamot and Windle Davis, his partner of thirty-six years, are the proprietors of the Inn at Hudson, a fanciful Dutch-Jacobean mansion in the heart of the lively, antiques-filled town in upstate New York. Like the proprietors who run it and the town in which it resides, the inn has a quirky charm that attracts visitors seeking something beyond the chintz-and-French-toast experience of a typical B&B. Although the inn’s public rooms and five guest suites are filled with antiques, scrolling plaster work, stained glass, and other accouterments of formal grandeur, this is also a private home. Personal memorabilia of a life in the arts—including a pair of puppets bearing an uncanny resemblance to the hosts—make it clear that this is not generic lodging.

“I was staying in a grand, elegant house to be sure, but it was every bit as comfortable as my grandma’s house,” says Christopher Radko, a recent guest visiting from Westchester County, New York. “What fun to meet the motley crew who live there, their friends who visit, and other guests who stay there. The front yard is a cottage garden dream; the hosts are gracious and at ease.”
That ease, however, has been hard-won for the house, the town, and the couple, and all three are inextricably linked by history and accident.

Lamot met Davis in Boston in 1974. Soon after, the two formed an a cappella singing group, Honey Bea and the Meadow Muffins, with Lamot’s brother, Larry (affectionately known as “La”) and their good friend, Casey Cameron. After a breakthrough performance at a party hosted by the famed musical satirist Tom Lehrer, the group found themselves in demand, so they, along with a few musicians to augment their singing, formed a band.

“Casey worked for Little, Brown, the publisher of Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response, and she just loved the name,” Davis recalls of their band’s inspiration. Despite their status as an unsigned group with no promotional machine behind it, Human Sexual Response had two blockbuster hits, “Jackie Onassis” and “What Does Sex Mean to Me?” which took turns at the number-one slot on college radio charts. The band endured for eight years, all of them spent on tour, before breaking up in 1982. Even though the musicians would gather occasionally for reunion shows throughout the decade, Davis and Lamot looked forward to the next chapter of their lives together.
 

It came, surprisingly, in the form of an enormous Victorian house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, that was in dire need of restoration. Davis and Lamot decided to undertake the project, though neither of them had any experience or skills in that department.

The restoration, which they never quite completed, was a stunning success nonetheless. And when the couple decided to move to Key West, the sale of their home provided a high-profile endorsement of their achievement. “When we were in the band, our roadie and friend was Dan Elias, the host of Antiques Roadshow [the PBS program featuring expert antiques appraisals]. He and his wife, Karen Keane, CEO of Skinner Auction House in Boston, bought our home in Dorchester,” Davis says. The couple suddenly had a new sideline: buying and restoring derelict dwellings.

During the 1990s, the couple became active in the Provincetwon AIDS support group where Lamot made his debut as cabaret singer Musty Chiffon. “We were working in a deli,” Davis says, “and Dini  went into the vintage clothing store next door and came out with this look on his face, saying, ‘I just figured out my drag name! It’s Musty Chiffon!’”

Theatrical treats notwithstanding, Musty is first and foremost an accomplished singer who reinterprets songs along very personal lines. “I try to pick songs that mean something to me,” Lamot says. Musty’s repertoire is primarily rock but includes selections from Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin as well as some original material, such as a song that Lamot wrote about his boyhood fascination with Peggy Lee. Unlike many drag performers who affect a flirtatious stage persona, Musty strives for greater complexity. The poet and writer Mark Doty once opined that, “Musty Chiffon dwells in the shadowy zone between the extremely ironic and the weirdly sincere.”

After a brief stint in Los Angeles, the couple found their way to the East Coast and, eventually, to Hudson. “We’d had enough, and Dini wanted to be closer to his family in Bangor [Maine],” Davis explains. “We visited our friend Elaine Beaufait, a ceramic artist in Hudson, and as we drove up Warren Street, past all these wonderful historic buildings, all my renovating fleas were going nuts!”

It wasn’t long before the pair had purchased a vacant former department store downtown with a plan to start producing children’s puppet shows in their very own theater, the Other Glove. “We rented out the first floor as an antiques store, the second floor was the theater, and the third floor was our apartment,” Davis recalls. “It took a year to renovate, and on opening night all of our new friends were there doing last-minute things like painting, sweeping, mopping, pushing chairs around—whatever they could to help us open.”

But as Lamot and Davis soon discovered, not all of Hudson was so supportive. They had unwittingly walked right into the middle of a much-reported-on culture war between Hudson’s old-timers and the newcomers, a conflict, Davis claims, that was fanned, if not entirely fabricated, by St. Lawrence Cement, which was trying to build a plant in Hudson. Whatever the truth, the Other Glove Theater foundered.

“The children’s puppet shows just didn’t fly,” Davis says. “None of the old-timers would bring their kids into downtown Hudson because the newcomers were here. Besides, downtown Hudson had been scary for many years, and they didn’t want to be attacked by the crack.”

Undaunted, Davis and Lamot changed course and converted the theater into a popular cabaret and disco for a diverse crowd. “On Saturday nights, you’d find people from age twenty-one to eighty, gay, straight, white, black—those are the people who make up Hudson,” Davis says. Their stage became a magnet for big-name talent, too.

“Kate Pierson of the B-52s, Antony and the Johnsons, and Bitch and Animal all appeared on our stage,” Davis says. “We had everything from off-Broadway plays to opera singers from Italy’s L’Accademia del Teatro Città di Cagli who performed La Bohème. People were taking limos from Boston to see acts in our two-hundred-seat theater.”

Eventually, the couple’s enthusiasm for running the nightclub dimmed. “We were bartending and living above it so we were really losing our minds every week,” Davis recalls. It wasn’t long before the two contemplated a change. Not surprisingly, inspiration came in the form of a great house in desperate need of rescue.

Ever since arriving in Hudson, Lamot and Davis had been in love with the Dutch-Jacobean villa on Allen Street. “We had just bought the department store and were investigating the neighborhood,” Lamot recalls. “We drove past this house and I said, ‘I want to live in that convent.’ Windle told me to forget about it, that we could never afford it.” But Lamot was convinced that fate would intervene eventually.

One day, it did. Lamot and Davis learned that the carriage house of their beloved “convent” had become available, so they went to see it. The house had been built as a single family home in the early 1900s for the heir of the Sapolio Soap fortune, but it had served as a nursing home for the last twenty years. The current owner had recently demolished the nursing home addition, and when he met Davis and Lamot, he offered to swap the main house for their renovated department store. The couple didn’t leap at the deal immediately, but they were fascinated by the house. Its architect was none other than Marcus Reynolds of Albany, which gives special significance to the house’s architectural themes.

“Marcus Reynolds was a Van Rensselaer,” Davis explains, “the family that settled the Albany area. He was interested in American history and at the time that this house was being built in 1909, they were preparing for the tercentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s expedition, so the stained glass windows in the billiard room are of Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon. The windows were designed not just for any house but for this one.” Those stained glass windows—all forty-two panels of them—are most likely the work of William Lightfoot Price. According to Davis, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has four Price windows, identical to one in this house, on permanent display in the American Wing.

When Davis and Lamot viewed the property, however, many of these architectural treasures were obscured by rubble, disrepair, and neglect. “The nursing home had an industrial kitchen and the dishwasher had fallen through the floor to the basement,” Davis recalls. “The floors were ruined, and something had happened to the furnace that caused the heat to go off, so all the pipes leading to all eight bathrooms had frozen and burst. It was totally a disaster.”

When the couple finally considered trading the department store for the house, adversity struck again. “Our puppeteer friend Caleb Fullam came down with cancer,” Davis remembers. “I wasn’t sleeping. I kept asking myself, ‘Should we do this move?’ What were we thinking, taking on this ruin of a house? Caleb encouraged us to do it. One of the last things he said to me was, ‘Think of the adventure.’”

As the partners began the painstaking and tedious work of stabilizing, fixing, and restoring the house, Davis had the distinct feeling that Fullam’s spirit was guiding their efforts.

 “We’d undo something and something [else] would start working that wouldn’t work before,” he says. “We found all the hardware from the front door in a local shop. The caretaker for the nursing home had probably sold all of it cheaply and it ended up right here in town. We bought it all back and I didn’t mind paying for it. I saw it as a storage fee. I’m just so glad that we were able to get it all back.”

 Three years into the effort, there’s still plenty of work to be done. “There are two ways to renovate a house in great distress,” Davis says. “Slowly, or gut it. No way could this house have handled being gutted. It needed to be put back. That takes a long time.”

Nonetheless, progress has been made. Reminders from the house’s turn as a nursing home, such as exit signs and railings, have been removed, the plumbing and roof work completed, and the inlaid wooden floors restored. The art nouveau ceiling in the entry hall has been uncovered from a thick layer of yellow paint and professionals have repaired the plaster frieze in the dining room. The ornate plaster ceiling, though stabilized, awaits its turn.

Meanwhile, Davis and Lamot feel that the house is repaying them for their tender loving care. “When we moved here, we knew we’d have to find jobs or make this house our job,” Davis says. “When we realized that each bedroom has its own bathroom and is separated by thick brick walls, we realized this would be a perfect B&B. The house told us what it wanted to be.” Since they started taking in paying guests in 2006, the demand for rooms has been overwhelming.

Now, as the town of Hudson has just finished celebrating the quadricentennial of its namesake’s voyage, the house, which also pays tribute to the explorer, has finally found safe harbor.
“This house has never been scary at all,” Davis says. “I’ve always felt really comfortable here. I have to believe it has a guiding spirit.” But whether that spirit belongs to Hudson, Marcus Reynolds, Caleb Fullam, or even the two artists who currently call it home, one may never know. [JUNE 2010]

Catherine Censor is a freelance writer and editor from Katonah, N.Y. She covets an ornate Victorian of her own in Columbia or Berkshire County.

THE GOODS

The Inn at Hudson
317 Allen St.
Hudson, N.Y.
518.822.9322

Paisley for Brains
Starring Musty Chiffon
Jun 7 at 7:30
Capital Repertory Theatre
111 N. Pearl St.
Albany, N.Y.
518.462.6138