By Gary Walther

Thank God for dropped ceilings, THD said to himself as he toured the grand public rooms on the ground floor of Spicer Mansion, a new eight-room luxury hotel (opened in May) in Mystic, Connecticut.

The innkeeper, Louis Shapazian, was explaining the odyssey of the building from 1853, when it was built and shortly thereafter acquired by Captain Elihu Spicer as a grand but understated expression of his station in life, to the present (above), when it has once again become a grand but understated hotel on a coast (northeastern Connecticut and southeastern Rhode Island) that doesn’t have properties like this.

Continue reading …