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playful dreams
The O.Henry Hotel and Green Valley Grill fifteen years on . . .
by dennis QUaintanCe
Years prior to opening the O.Henry I was stopped
at a light on my slick BMW R65 motorcycle. I elbowed Nancy, my then-girlfriend (still my girlfriend, now my wife and mother of our 15-year-old twins — busy year), who was behind me. I pointed to where the O.Henry and Green Valley Grill now stand and said, “That’s where we’ll build our first hotel.” Sort of an audacious thing to say, given my bank balance and credentials, but dreams are free, and playful dreaming is at the core of my career and our hotels and restaurants.
The fifteenth anniversary of the O.Henry Hotel has led to a lot of reflection. The most delightful memories center around the design process we employed and some of the cues we took from local architecture. Most of all, I’m filled with warm feelings when I think about the camaraderie and collaboration I experienced during the whole process. A lot of those good feelings are grounded in my friendship with Don Rives, who was christened our “Minister of Design” back then. Don died five years ago. The best way to describe our feeling for Don is to read the plaque in the lobby of the O.Henry that we put up when we dedicated the adjacent garden to him: “Don Rives . . . gave back as rain what he received as mist; he taught us about beauty and joy and how to turn our dreams into a physical reality. In his memory, we lovingly dedicate this garden.” (Kleenex, please.) (There is even a bit of an “O.Henry Twist” in all this. I first saw that line on C. Alphonso Smith’s headstone in Green Hill Cemetery and thought, “That reminds me of Don.” Smith — and here is the twist — was the head of the English department at the U.S. Naval Academy and O.Henry’s biographer.) We decided right from the get-go that we wanted to bring back the community-centered hotels that all but disappeared when airline travel and interstates caused most hotels to move away from neighborhoods to commercial areas near highways or airports. We wanted to bring back to Greensboro not just a great place for travelers to stay, but also a place that folks from the neighborhood would enjoy, like the grand old hotels that were once real centers of community life. We wanted a place that was “in and of” our community. In order to make this dream real, we needed just the right location, a well-crafted building with enThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
during architectural appeal (Read: great proportions and appropriate materials, inside and out) and, most important, a sincere, competent and friendly group of people to take great care of our guests. We thought that the best way to get good outcomes with the design was to find buildings around here that folks have loved for years (or would still love if they hadn’t been torn down) and honor their memory by mirroring some of their design features and history in our hotel and restaurant. We settled on pretending that Charles C. Hartmann, the architect of the original O.Henry Hotel that stood at Bellmeade and Elm from 1919 till 1979, was still of the earth and was playing the role of lead designer. He also designed the Jefferson Standard Building and many other landmarks. So . . . the new O.Henry’s rustication of the first two levels, the shouldered arched windows and the black-and-white basket-weave mosaic tiles in the restrooms are all features that Hartmann would have surely used. Beyond Hartmann, our lobby pays homage to the lovely and warm honeyed-pine living room of the Hanes home in Winston-Salem that is now the centerpiece of the SECCA Museum. And who doesn’t love the urns atop Aycock School? Urns on the O.Henry are their first cousins. With the Green Valley Grill, we decided to pretend that there was already a building on the site that we would adapt and reuse. With that approach, we got to decide the precise building we would like to have found! What’s more fun or playful than that? We decided we’d like a building that was an amalgam of the power plant at UNCG, the little pump house in Lake Daniel and the store at the corner of Highway 150 and Lake Brandt Road. With that beginning and with Don employing proportion guidelines from Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture, we ended up with the Green Valley Grill. (Don did all of the calculations by hand on yellow legal pads; he didn’t like machines like calculators.) What did I learn from all this? Be careful what you dream, because you might end up there. Dreaming, I’ve found, works out best when it is matched with pragmatism, but you’ve got to start with dreams and worry about all the practical stuff later. The objections to any dream — and there will be plenty — won’t go away just because you continue to dream. But if you develop the dream far enough, the positive factors might multiply and bulldoze the objections. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a Lucky 32, a Proximity Hotel, a Print Works Bistro, a Green Valley Grill or an O.Henry Hotel. Here’s to dreams and to my partners, Mike Weaver, Will Stevens and Nancy King Quaintance, who helped turn some of my dreams into reality and who stick with this daft and dewy-eyed dope and his impossible hopes! Cheers! OH Dennis Quaintance is CSO (Chief Storytelling Officer) for Quaintance Weaver
Restaurants and Hotels.
November 2013
O.Henry 15