Then too, what could be more romantic than a stay in the home built by George Starrett for his wife Ann? While there are too many unique touches to detail, perhaps the most interesting is the free-standing staircase that coils up the entrance just inside the lobby. It ranks with the famous Santa Fe stair and is interesting enough that the Smithsonian offered to tear it down and rebuilt it.
Ann Starrett's ghost seems alive and well. Her image lives on in the Four Virtues and Four Seasons inside the dome's tower over the stair. As seasons change sunrise casts a Valentine red light from the dome windows onto the appropriate image. The restoration project here seems ongoing, but most of the improvements, aside from the "systems" help needed by old Victorians, included a return to the stenciled walls, Virginia Starrett, a descendent, noted were the original choices. Lots of artists live in, or at least pass through Port Townsend and Larry Boise, who arrived by bicycle, hand-stenciled the lovely frieze in the front room.
Besides restoration, the current innkeepers, the Sokols, added fireplaces and baths. Since Mr. Starrett had built the home with one of the first central heating systems in the Northwest none are original, but they are authentic. The front parlor mantle, for example, came from a Chicago Mansion of similar age and design.
The private baths in mansion bedrooms were a later improvement as well. Bob Sokol, who notes he did not learn his plumbing and other building skills while an Air Force One navigator, did the "heavy lifting with lots of help from local craftsmen and artists. His wife Edel handled the décor with the classic pattern-on-pattern Victorian excess that also reflects her German heritage, and the family collection of antiques that filled two moving vans when the Sokols moved West.
The downstairs also includes a back parlor, massive dining room where typically copious B&B breakfasts "finish off guests until at least 2 o'clock in the afternoon" and sitting areas. Bedrooms, besides those outside in the old Carriage House, are upstairs where the Starrett's master bedroom with a massive four-poster bed defines romantic. We've seen similar rooms in other Victorian Inns in Cape May, New Jersey, Galveston, Texas and Amelia Island, Florida that share the architecture of Port Townsend, but never a better room.
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