AGNEW — It’s water-view bed-and-breakfast heaven along the Strait of Juan de Fuca: Domaine Madeleine, Colette’s, Eden by the Sea — and, among them, a replica of George Washington’s home in Virginia.
The George Washington Inn, one of several lavish B&Bs off Finn Hall Road, was inspired by Mount Vernon, the first president’s mansion on the Potomac River.
So when Susan Townsend, a vice regent at Mount Vernon, came out for a weekend visit, she beheld a familiar sight — and was delighted with the Sequim-Port Angeles influences on the inn.
To begin with, there’s a young lavender farm just outside the front door.
And the piazza, a summertime breakfast spot along the north face, takes a big breath of salty air from the Strait.
It all spells “spectacular,” Townsend said Monday, as she began getting ready for her trip home to Wilmington, Del.
Walking down the grand staircase, Townsend smiled up at another familiar sight: a painting by George Crabb of Sequim, inspired by Edward Savage’s “The Washington Family,” a 1796 work that now hangs in the National Gallery of Art.
Crabb’s canvas has the family reversed, with George the father on the right instead of on the left; that aligns, in a way, with the inn’s position on the opposite coast from Mount Vernon.
Janet and Dan Abbott, proprietors of the George Washington Inn, also welcomed members of Townsend’s family for a quick, but grand, tour of nearby sights on Mother’s Day weekend.
Family toured area
Townsend’s husband Coleman, her daughter, Laura Townsend Faber, and her grandchildren Tasha, 7, and Toby, 10, went beachcombing at Dungeness Spit, tidepooling at Salt Creek County Park and snowball-fighting around Hurricane Ridge.
It was “a stunning array of ecosystems,” said Faber, who lives in Seattle.
Meantime, the Abbots are preparing the inn’s “carriage house,” a smaller building out front, to become a lavender farm store on the ground floor and a vacation hideaway on the upper floor starting this summer.
They began building the B-and-B in 2006 and opened it in 2008, about a century and a half after the Mount Vernon Ladies Association reopened George Washington’s Virginia estate.
The ladies association bought the historic property in 1853 after it had fallen into disrepair, Townsend said.
After seven years of fundraising and restoration, the nonprofit group opened it to the public.
Today the association continues to manage the Mount Vernon house and the 500 acres surrounding it.
For information about staying in the West Coast replica of Mount Vernon, visit www.GeorgeWashingtonInn.com or phone 360-452-5207.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
