Milo's Guesthouse: Davis, WV
Milo’s Guesthouse is basically the type of lumberjack hotel I want to exist wherever I travel: affordable, unique, pet-friendly. Also: dope beats pulsing through century-old hardwood floors.
This is one of what I’ve started calling keypad motels—very small properties with very limited or, more likely, no onsite staff that are usually accessed via a previously exchanged keypad code, not a key or keycard. (In this case a keycode opens a lockbox with a key, but the principle remains the same.)
I’ve also started thinking of them as Airbnb motels, in part because you can imagine them as larger Airbnb-style properties that just happened to get subdivided into motels (or guesthouses) at some point. When you book at a place like this, you’re usually selecting a specific room—each a curated “experience” in techspeak—not a room type. Also, in the case of Milo’s, the rooms, which were rented out to local lumberjacks a century ago, happen to be listed on the actual Airbnb site.
Milo’s Guesthouse is located on the kind of Old West-y main drag of Davis, a popular tourist town next to Blackwater Falls and probably the closest thing the Mid-Atlantic has to a mountain ski town (it’s proximate to both Snowshoe Mountain Resort and Canaan Valley). On the first floor of the building is Milo’s Restaurant, with the eight rooms of the guesthouse on the second floor. Access to said rooms is via a backdoor off the alley parking lot or a backdoor in the rear of the restaurant. The latter is accessible only during dining hours.
Through these various backdoors, you will find another door just off the kitchen, which leads to a very steep staircase. At the top of it is a small comfort zone with a coffeemaker and a communal fridge. Each room is distinctive in both style and layout. You can get a king bed, a pair of queens, a single queen, or a two-room suite. I’ve stayed in the two-queen room and one of the king rooms. All of the rooms are pet-friendly.
Each room has its own color and furniture scheme. Interior design isn’t exactly my area, but I’ll call those schemes stylish and subdued. Colors are deep and rich and the furniture is a mix of contemporary and historic. I’ve worked and stayed in some pretty fancy boutique hotels and I’d prefer the decor here to any of them. There’s character, but nothing is precious. This was, after all, a home to lumberjacks.
The wood floors in the rooms are all original, dating back to 1896. They feel it: rough and smoothed over with time, like driftwood. The Milo’s website notes that, because the floors are original, insulation from the noise of the restaurant and bar downstairs is lacking. On a recent Saturday night, we caught some muffled and unobnoxious dope beats through the floor. Earplugs are provided, which is a running theme at this style of accommodation. See also: Seneca Pines Lodge.
So, yes, there is a restaurant and bar. Guests even get a pair of free drink tokens with their reservation. It’s a nice space and keeps with the character of the rooms. That said, my actual eating experiences were pretty rough. I’ve ordered burgers to medium temperature twice and both came back very well done. My companion’s poke bowl, a Milo’s specialty, was also a bit oversauced and sloppy. A paloma just tasted like watered-down juice and tequila, while a habanero margarita was overhot to the point of undrinkability.
It’s kinda weird because the guesthouse clearly had a ton of thought and effort put into it. Except … the HVAC. Christ. It’s all minisplits and that means every room’s air conditioner is connected to every other room’s air conditioner. So, if you change the mode on one unit in one room from cooling to heat, it shuts the entire system down. This happened numerous times despite BIG SIGNS in every room saying not to do that exact thing. People, I implore you.
In any case, I’m sure I’ll return in the upcoming shoulder season before the snow jocks move in (and also to try out another rehabbed keypad motel down the road).
-- michael byrne
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