In the late 1800s, the Maxwell Chambers Hotel stood on Depot Street in Davidson with a 200 seat dining room and the best rooms in the county, meeting the trains and the families visiting Davidson College. The hotel is long gone. The idea of it is not.
For this, The Davidson Village Inn rose on the same site in 1993, and its owners describe it as continuing the tradition of serving guests in the same gracious manner. That is a claim a lot of hotels make. This one has a pedicab to back it up.
It started with the railroad
Davidson was founded in 1837 around the college named for General William Lee Davidson, and the railroad’s arrival in the middle of that century turned a college village into a farming town shipping cotton, according to the inn’s own history of the town. The Maxwell Chambers was the hotel that era built, a grand thing for a small place, and it served the college’s visitors for decades.
The inn that replaced it was built in 1993 with large arched windows, a covered pedestrian walkway and what the owners call Mecklenburg brick, chosen to match the college campus across the street and the storefronts along Main Street. It has 18 rooms across five types, from king rooms to family suites with a kitchenette, and a lobby with a library and a fireplace that the AAA inspectors describe as cozy.
The people behind it
The inn is family owned and operated by Mariano and Caroline Doble, who describe themselves as career hoteliers who always dreamed of returning to their hospitality roots after years of corporate assignments in the Caribbean and Latin America. They say they are delighted to be part of the Davidson community, and the reviews suggest the community agrees: the inn holds a 4.9 rating across more than 350 public reviews, and guests describe the staff as extraordinarily kind.
Small inns live or die on their owners, and the Dobles’ background in large resorts shows in the details that a bed and breakfast usually cannot manage: Turkish bamboo towels, a business traveler’s executive suite with a four poster bed and a proper desk, and a consistency that earned the inn a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence in consecutive years.
What you actually get
Breakfast is a deluxe continental buffet with fair trade coffee from Summit, the Davidson roaster, locally made baked goods, fresh fruit, eggs, cheese, yogurt and juices, served in the living and dining areas. Afternoon tea comes with locally made cookies. The inn’s pedicab takes guests around town, and guests are often offered free tickets to college sporting events or films at the local theater, according to Visit Lake Norman.
The location is the rest of the argument. The inn sits directly across from Davidson College, steps from Main Street’s restaurants and shops, a mile from the shore of Lake Norman and less than half an hour from Charlotte. It draws couples, families, prospective students touring the college and business travelers visiting the companies along the interstate.
The rooms carry the inn’s attention to detail. The king rooms come with a reading chair and a foyer with a microwave and mini fridge, the executive suites with a four poster queen and a working desk, and the family suites with two queens and a full kitchenette, according to the inn. Every room has fine linens, high speed wireless and a flat panel television, and the private baths are stocked with Greenwich Bay bath products. Pets are not accepted in the guest rooms.
The Dobles have also written a short history of the town for their guests, which explains why the inn exists. Davidson was a farming town until the automobile and the Depression ended that, and the college, ranked among the top liberal arts schools in the country with dozens of Rhodes Scholars, built the professional community that now fills the restaurants on what the inn calls Restaurant Row. The Maxwell Chambers served that town’s grandest era. The Village Inn serves its current one.
The inn also markets itself to a specific traveler: the person working in the Charlotte area for a week who would rather come home to a fireplace and a library than a highway hotel. Its own tips for business travelers list a safe, peaceful place to stay, in room extras, complimentary amenities that reduce a trip’s small costs, and a breakfast that lets a traveler keep to a routine. The pedicab, again, appears on the list.
Why it matters
Davidson has fewer hotel rooms than a college town its size usually carries, and on graduation weekend or a parents’ weekend the inn is the room everyone wants. That scarcity is part of why it matters, but not most of it.
Most of it is that a town which lost its grand hotel a century ago got a modest one back, built to look like it belonged, and run by two people who had managed resorts across the Caribbean and chose, at the end of that, a street in Davidson. The Maxwell Chambers had 200 seats. The Davidson Village Inn has a pedicab and a fireplace, and the same address.