Each with a background in fashion, the inn owners focused their trained eyes on filling the suites, rooms, and common areas with priceless French furnishings and imported textiles. Walls are richly but subtly hued in the pigment-saturated palette of Farrow and Ball, while the hallmark luminescent shades of the Donald Kaufman Color Collection are reflected in trims. Much of the Smiths’ considerable collection of antiques can be purchased and is a frequent source for some of the country’s most respected interior designers. An outgrowth of the couple’s passion for the historic treasures that fill the inn, the gallery at Soniat House offers antiques lovers such precious plunder as a gilded tole-painted chandelier whose twin hangs in the Spirito Santo Museum in Florence, Italy. “Soniat House is one of a kind and the result of the Smiths’ vision,” says gallery manager Arlene Montgomery. “They choose unique things and only those things they truly love. Here, you will discover everything from an 1860s garden stool to lamps made from sixteenth-century columns.”
