The instant the doorman pushed open the heavy glass double doors and ushered me into the marbled halls, I felt I’d arrived at Lisbon’s Four Seasons Ritz, long my favorite hotel. But The Umstead is only half the size and located in, of all places, Cary, North Carolina. The state’s white-hot Research Triangle Park (RTP), anchored by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, was overdue for a hotel as posh, as pampering, as up-to-the-second as Europe’s and Asia’s best. After all, IBM, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, and EMC, among other global giants, have put down roots in the RTP, and visiting execs have long had to settle for midrange chain hotels.
WHAT’S THE BIG WOW? That a 150-room, five-star, luxe hotel rumored to have cost upward of $80 million would land in the red-clay hills of North Carolina.
LIKED BEST The big, balconied, lakeside rooms and suites with nine-foot ceilings, wall-to-wall windows, muted neutral colors, high-def flat-screen TV, voluptuous linens, and electronic gadgets galore (even microchipped “come-and-get-me” room-service trays), But most of all, the art-a cool mil’s worth of paintings and sculpture plus eye-popping urns by master North Carolina potters Mark Hewitt and Ben Owen III.
LIKED LEAST Herons Restaurant. My crab cake appetizer was gluey—a sin in these parts. And though the chèvre-plumped agnolotti were better, cornmeal-dusted prawns on grits consisted of three large shrimp (not prawns), overcooked and foundering in a pallid gruel. There’s no “wow” here. And no justification for the New York prices.
WHO SHOULD STAY THERE Executives jetting in from all points of the compass to do business at the RTP, honeymooners, well-heeled leisure travelers (yes, there’s plenty to do in deepest North Carolina), even locals rich enough to drop $300 a night and up—way up—for a romantic weekend.
WOULD YOU GO BACK Like a shot—especially if Herons gets its act together.
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