The beautiful Delamar Mystic has opened in Connecticut

A new hotel has opened in Mystic, Connecticut, where guests can enjoy the beautiful design on the Mystic River.

The exterior of the new Delamar Mystic (Julie Bidwell).

If you manage to pull your eyes away from the views of the undulating Mystic River offered by the huge lobby lounge windows of the newly opened Delamar Mystic, look up.

In the nautical-chic space—surrounded by maps and historic portraits of Mystic movers-and-shakers—chandeliers dangle from the ceilings. Small pyramids of green glass glitter from the three-tiered beauties, evoking the deck prisms that once bounced sunlight into the darkened lower decks of 19th-century ships. Hotelier Charles Mallory dreamed up the concept, and tapped Connecticut artisan Gardner Murray of Murray Workshop to bring the vision to life.

“We’re trying to create a handshake between the centuries,” Mallory says of his new hotel’s design.

For Mallory, founder and CEO of the Stamford, Connecticut-based Delamar Hotel Collection—with five boutique beauties throughout Connecticut and one in Traverse City, Michigan—his hotel within Mystic’s Seaport melds the past and present.

It feels especially personal, too, not just owing to the intimate scale of the 31-key hotel with its year-round heated pool and seafood restaurant, La Plage. The latest Delamar, which began construction in summer 2023 and opened this past February, is Mallory’s chance to celebrate how his family history flows with Mystic’s shipbuilding past. And for guests, the historic-inspired digs feel like a mischievous after-hours jaunt into a museum to peep the artifacts up-close, slurp oysters in the exhibits, and curl up for some shut-eye in a diorama of a ship captain’s seaside abode.

Most schoolkids in Massachusetts have some experience with Mystic, thanks to field trips to the nearby Mystic Aquarium and the maritime history-centered Mystic Seaport Museum. For adults, Delamar Mystic is basically a history refresher course; besides the historic flourishes of the interiors, the hotel is literally on the northern end of the museum’s campus. Guests can spot historic vessels right from the Delamar’s ship deck-inspired pool deck, plus visit the museum for free.

As the museum’s recreation of a 19th-century seaport village is steps away, a glass behemoth modernist hotel wasn’t the way to go.

“We wanted to try and thread the needle between something that looked like it might have fitted in the village on the one hand, but was a contemporary interpretation of a 19th century building on the other,” Mallory says.

The result—conceived by Bruce Beinfield of Beinfield Architects with Richard Turlington leading as the construction design architect—is a stately three-story stunner, leaning into textures of wood shingle and slats that were common among homes in Mystic’s shipping heyday.

A note on the location, too: the hotel provides free transportation to downtown Mystic via courtesy cars, though the easy fifteen-minute stroll is worth it for the views of the tree-shrouded shore and the black-crowned night herons that hang by the bascule bridge. (A visit to the sustainable seafood restaurant Shipwright’s Daughter, helmed by James Beard Award-winning chef David Standridge, is a must. As is stocking up on baked goods like cinnamon buns and key lime cheesecake at local bakery Sift).

While outside the muted gray tones are a canvas for the beauty of the Mystic River (and the fall foliage gives the Berkshires and Vermont a run for their money), inside is a lush mix of greens and blues. Nautical design can often tread into kitschy waters with rusty anchors and fish on the walls, though a restrained design created in collaboration between Maryland-based HSV Design, and Westport, Connecticut designer Sabrina Eliasoph—with plenty of input from Mallory—charts a course for seaside sophistication.

Guests can sip a welcoming glass of bubbly or sparkling water in the lobby, with its vaulted ceiling decorated with a 19th-century world map design, and gander the vibrant custom crab and lobster wallpaper by Timorous Beasties.

“We wanted to make you feel like you might be in a home that had been owned by a ship owner of the 19th century and restored by someone in a more contemporary vein,” Mallory says. In the green-paneled lobby lounge graced with gold flourishes, guests can relax on cushy banquettes, warm up by the fireplace, and gander the maritime murals created by Juniper Books on the backs of book spines, using images from the Mystic Seaport Museum archives.

In these first-floor spaces, a few of Mallory’s forebears keep watch. A portrait of his great-great grandfather and namesake, Charles Mallory, sits behind the front desk. The portrait made its way to the Mark Twain House in Hartford, where someone bought it at an auction in 1962. That art lover called up Mallory and sold him the painting, and it had been sitting in his home for about 20 years.

The lobby lounge also features a portrait of the historic Mallory’s son, the famed yachtsman Charles Henry Mallory. A model of a sleek racing sloop built in 1880 called Annie—also the first vessel that Mystic Seaport Museum acquired—sits between the lobby bookshelves and across from a painting of the same ship within the La Plage restaurant. Those historic Mallorys are buried in the tranquil neighboring Elm Grove Cemetery, which guests can spot from the deck of the hotel, and it’s like they’re watching their descendent keep up the family’s waterside ways.

Besides the grand window-wrapped ballroom where a number of weddings have already taken place, the guest rooms carry on the ship-shape aesthetic. Delamar Mystic features 31 rooms, including five suites and a two-bedroom cottage, used mainly as a wedding suite. Rooms feature nautical knot drawer pulls, hardwood floors, ship artwork, and vintage novels like Tristan Jones’s Saga of a Wayward Sailor tucked into the nightstands. Sleek bathrooms boast Bulgari bath products. As tempting as it is to soak for hours in the suite’s tub, turn your attention to more vivid waters. Each of the rooms feature grand windows that face the Mystic River, where guests can float off to sleep and wake up to those soothing river vistas.

Delamar Mystic, 105 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic, Connecticut. Standard rooms start at $400 per night.