Field Guide opens on Mountain Road

Field Guide, located at 433 Mountain Road in the shell of the old Ye Olde England Inne, appears aimed to attract fairly adventurous travelers who want to experience the vibe of an old-school budget mountain hostel but don’t lack the money to travel in style.

That’s because part of the Field Guide package is the trust that you, the traveler, are meant to put in the hotel’s staff.

“We believe in a sense of space,” Thomas said. “We don’t want people to go into one of our hotels and not feel like they are where they are.”

That sense of space is part time-warp, part Stowe cocktail — a mix of some early 20th-century touches that would have fit in at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, some 1960s-era ski-town via Austin Powers, and thoroughly modern amenities such as flat-screen Apple TVs and Keurig coffee makers.

If you checked in wearing a pair of Uggs, your sheepskin boots might want to stay behind and live among the decor long after you’ve checked out.

The hotel’s sense of style is evident only after you walk inside. Other than a paint job and some detail work, the exterior doesn’t look much different from Ye Olde England Inne. But once you’re in the lobby, it’s easy to tell how busy Rachel Reider’s design team was during the summer, transforming the guts of the 24,000-square-foot hotel.

For starters, there are at least a half-dozen types of chairs to sit on, some soft, some firm, some with space for two. There’s a tiny, funky white fireplace on one side of the lobby, something that would look at home in an episode of The Jetsons Go Skiing, while a more traditional stone and mortar fireplace occupies the other side. The wooden beams of the original construction have been left exposed, scrubbed down to their woodsy essence, pores and all.

Wood shows up in countless design touches, from the rough-hewn stacked timbers that make up the front desk to the carved, varnished logs placed snug against the bathtubs as a clever way of simultaneously hiding some of the plumbing and providing a place for your wineglass while you soak.

“It all invokes our interpretation of Stowe as it is now, and where we think it will be going,” said Rob Blood, Lark Hotels founder and CEO.

Field Guide has 30 units available, with 17 rooms in the main building and larger suites elsewhere on the property. Rooms start at $189 a night for a room with one king-sized bed, and go up in price, and in luxury, from there.

Every Lark Hotel has a singular suite or room that is completely different from the rest, the Lark Suite. At Field Guide, that suite is at the top of the historic edifice, looking out over the West Branch River, the picturesque white church steeple, and Sunset Rock.

An attached restaurant is still in the works, which management hopes to open at the beginning of next year; it will also have a somewhat throwback name: Picnic Social.

Thomas said Picnic Social’s cuisine will spotlight snackable, portable dishes such as fried chicken, sausages, potato salads, all with Vermont stylings. There will be plenty of beer, too. The old Mr. Pickwick’s Pub is still largely functional, and includes a 24-tap system.

Until then, food will be available out of a small service kitchen located somewhere in the maze of hallways, and delivered to rooms as part of a “curated small plates” breakfast.

Other amenities include free Keurig coffee, free Wi-Fi, 40-inch LED televisions with Apple TV, kimono robes, bath supplies from Lather, and they all come with the room, because Lark Hotels doesn’t believe in charging extra for the extras.

Guests also receive an iPad, leather-bound like a journal and loaded with information about all the things to do and see in Stowe and the area — restaurants, galleries, shops and boutiques, and a major focus on recreational offerings, from birding to zip-lining.

Lark Hotels aims to attract the more adventurous traveler, and the 3-year-old hotel group is as young and precocious as its would-be clientele – this is a place that, after all, has a deck of Cards Against Humanity in the lobby.

Sending guests into the world with a digital field guide full of things to do fits in perfectly with the hotel’s moniker.

“Guests judge us based on the advice we give them,” Blood said. “And a lot of that happens outside the walls of our property.”