Whatever the source of the inspiration for creating the Inn―Seaman and Sarre’s desire to provide better accommodations for their friends, or their lifelong interest in undertaking new challenges―it certainly wasn’t the profit motive. In addition to the guest list, the other unique feature about the Inn was its founding philosophy that everyone who stayed there should feel as if they were the guests “in the country house of a particularly generous and open hearted host.”  There was to be no tipping and all charges were inclusive. This meant that guests paid a flat rate (the Inn’s rates remained reasonable) with no added costs. Many predicted that Yama Farms would be bankrupt within a year. Seaman and Sarre, however, wanted to provide something unique for their guests. This was, in their words “a hotel that should not be like a hotel at all [but] the kind that could be dreamed only by a man who didn’t know anything about running one.” It was never meant to be, they added, “a commercial undertaking.”

        Celebrating Christmas at the Inn.

Postcard views of the Inn.

“I wanted the furnishings to be exceptionally well chosen and allowed a mild extravagance in carrying out the scheme.”

Frank Seaman, “Memoir,” n.d.

“Truly the bedrooms in the new inn are wonderful ! No well set city or country home might offer better—with their rare and unusual furniture, the exquisite linen into which the peasant women of a far distant land have worked the odd characters of the Japanese mottos of Yama Farms with exquisite patience and a loving care. And if modernity in the form of individual telephones, of electric lights and fans so set as to be controlled from the head of the beds, of tiled individual baths and of private lounging and sleeping porches has intruded itself, it has done so in a modest and proper spirit that shocks not the sense of fitness.”

Edward Hungerford in “The Hotel Where Fees are Taboo” Travel Magazine, 1913.

Post card views of the Inn often featured the stone arch bridge that connected the Inn building with the nine-hole golf course.

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