Photo above: Darryl Smalls, who grew up in Downtown Charleston, outside the lounge of the new Dunlin hotel, on rural Johns Island.
“Let me tell you about my morning Sunday last,” says Casey Lavin, the president of Beemok Hospitality Collection, billionaire Ben Navarro’s Charleston-based development group. Lavin is a Charlestonian of fairly recent vintage, and he’s not the least jaded about its charms. “I woke up at 6:30 a.m. and took my daughter out to Sullivan’s Island, 10 minutes from our house, to watch sea turtles hatch and crawl to the water. A half hour later I was in downtown Charleston in a historic church. Right after that I was having brunch in one of the best restaurants in America, and two hours after that I was taking a nap under a huge live oak tree. It’s a bizarre environment.”
Charleston’s out-of-the-ordinariness is what keeps me coming back here, which I do so often (this September was my seventh visit in eight years) I now consider myself something between a beenya (Gullah Geechee for a person who’s been in the South Carolina Lowcountry for a long time) and a comeya, a newcomer. The latter cohort has been growing by leaps and bounds, especially over the last five years, drawn (to visit or to settle) by that uniquely Charlestonian mix: on the one hand, a vast rural playground (90 miles of Atlantic Ocean beach and swaths of tidal salt marsh teeming with waterways and wildlife), and on the other, a sophisticated urban core, an eight-square-mile peninsula studded with the biggest concentration of meticulously maintained historic buildings in the United States, plus serious cultural and gastronomic pleasures.
“It’s a once-in-a-generation phenomenon,” Lavin marvels, “to have a place evolve with this kind of easy connectivity. You can stay in the country, and 20 miles away you’ve got this…thing.” I’m putting that lifestyle to the test, prompted by new developments in both Charleston’s environs and in the city proper. That’s the other thing about Charleston: You think you know this small place after many visits, but that turns out never to be true.
The Country
The biggest travel news in Charleston these days is the Dunlin, which opened last August. “If someone had told me a few years ago that Auberge Resorts were building a hotel on Johns Island,” says a rival hotelier, “on the marshes, I’d have said that’s the dumbest thing ever. Who’s going to go there? But it’s beautiful, even improbable, and successful.”
You won’t find here the grand mansions of Kiawah Island, home of the Sanctuary, the area’s first five-star resort. Johns Island is seriously rural: romantic roads overarched by entwined oak branches, little houses, family farms. (One such, previously owned by the Limehouse family, is now the Kiawah River development, of which the Dunlin is part.)
Just as the Sanctuary is oriented toward the island’s exceptionally wide 10-mile beach, the Dunlin’s white West Indian–inflected structures (an architectural nod, perhaps, to the cottages of Barbados, from which some of Charleston’s earliest settlers came) face spartina grass and tidal estuaries. The mint-green shades in their interiors, by Gucci-publicist-turned-designer Amanda Lindroth, are surely meant to bring that soothing marshy environment inside.
I go kayaking among the marshes on the Kiawah River with a guide from the outfitter Coastal Expeditions (followed by a Dunlin-prepared picnic breakfast on a strip of solid ground); my cabana at the pool faces the tall, dense marsh grass, as does my private porch and the soaking tub in my room.
Before dinner at Linnette’s, the Dunlin’s restaurant, as soon as I can I repair to the hotel’s large central porch for sundowners, and I plant myself there until chow time. Others have the same idea, and the mood is convivial. The tide is slowly rising (there’s a tidal chart outside reception that’s updated daily), the spartina grass is swaying in the breeze, two snow-white egrets are striking beautiful poses, and an osprey is fishing for its supper. Sipping an Old Fashioned (which I’ve learned to make in a mixology class), I’m struck by an improbable thought: The last time I felt this serene and in the moment was at sunset on the deck of a lodge in South Africa. Yet downtown Charleston is only 20 miles away.
Here's a plan: Post House for drinks and dinner, then a night in one of its seven pretty rooms, below.
Even closer are two hotels in Mount Pleasant, the coastal town across from the Charleston peninsula, both new to me. The Post House, in its Old Village, is about 10 minutes from downtown across Charleston Harbor. Wealthy Charlestonians built summer homes in the picturesque enclave as early as the 18th century (the oldest surviving house dates from 1755); it has had cameos in the film The Notebook and the TV series Outer Banks. But the inn, which opened in August 2020 after a two-year renovation by its new owners, Kate and Ben Towill of the hospitality firm Basic Projects, still feels like something of a family secret, just seven rooms over a bar and restaurant in an 1896 building in Old Village’s minuscule commercial strip: a small gym, an old-fashioned drugstore/soda fountain, two shops. (Don’t worry, gentlemen, the in-room menu can, in a pinch, come to your sartorial rescue: It offers a $75 bow tie, “because you never know when you’ll need one in Charleston.”)
The bar area is convivial and buzzy with linen-clad locals, the food is excellent, and the streets all around present prime real estate–ogling opportunities: beautiful white clapboard houses of various degrees of grandeur, some with white picket fences, amid rows of luxuriantly spreading oak trees. And the shoreline? “Just take a left out the front door,” says a staffer, “then left again. There’s a stone bench in the grasses where you can sit.” When I get to the bench, there’s a breeze off the harbor. The air is salty, and Charleston’s distinctive steepled skyline is clearly delineated against the blue sky. “O’ Be Joyful,” a sign on the lawn of a sprawling private waterfront property exhorts.
The Beach Club, the newest part of the Charleston Harbor Resort & Marina, has a similar view but from two much larger perches: its 30,000-square-foot waterfront pool complex and a pretty man-made beach. Chaise longues and cabanas abound, water taxis ferry you at frequent intervals to downtown, and boats of all sizes bob invitingly off the marina’s piers. Inviting, too, is the Freedom Boat Club, which operates from here. Membership gives you unlimited access to a boat (“like a ride share for people who don’t want the hassle of owning”). Minimum membership length? One month. Hmmm. Charleston has many ways of reeling you in.
THE WAY OF WATER
Eat good food—but don’t forget to get out there.
Charleston Sailing Charters They’ll organize anything from a private two-hour tour of Charleston Harbor (what I did, on a sailing yacht) to an all-day sail with stops at Sullivan’s Island’s empty beaches followed by sunset cocktails with views of the city skyline. Various catering options are available, as are towels, beach chairs, and cabanas. And whatever you choose, there will be dolphins.
Coastal Expeditions This nature-focused outfitter, based in Mount Pleasant but wide-ranging, is renowned for the expertise of its guides and the different ways you can choose to explore: by boat, kayak, standup paddleboard, or a combination of paddle and hike. Over the years I’ve done them all, and at all times of day. As one of my guides observed, “There is no excuse for being bored in a universe this weird.”
The Town
The Pinch, where I’m staying next, does an excellent job of reeling you in, too. It is smack in Charleston’s urban epicenter, at the corner of King Street, the city’s shopping mecca, and George Street, home of its imposing Gaillard Center for the performing arts. Everything about this recently opened little hotel (it has two Michelin keys) makes me want to linger. A smooth amalgam of three buildings, two of them from 1843, it has a discreet, un-hotel-like entrance, on a small cobblestone courtyard it shares with the equally newish Lowland restaurant, which is presided over by chef Jason Stanhope (a 15-year veteran of the gastronomic powerhouse FIG).
The Pinch’s suites, filled with light and decorated with Craftsman furniture, all have full-size kitchens. The kicker: Three fully furnished “residences” are available if you check in for at least 30 days. Which gives you ideas.
I look in on some city favorites, like the magnificently over-the-top and uncannily well-preserved Wentworth Mansion, built in 1886 by one Francis Silas Rodgers in the very Charlestonian hope of luring his 13 children and their families to stay in the city forever. (It’s now a 21-room hotel.)
Then, fueled by oysters at Delaney Oyster House, across from the Mother Emanuel AME Church, and at the buzzy new Darling Oyster Bar, I set out on a reconnaissance of what’s in the works. The biggest hospitality news in town is the Cooper, the first city hotel right on the water—adjacent to Waterfront Park, with its own marina, boats, and five dining venues, being developed by Beemok and opening in 2025. “We’re starting to see a ‘luxury pop,’ ” Casey Lavin says. “It’s something this city has not seen before.” Beemok also purchased the grande dame Charleston Place and is renovating it into a five-star. Four Seasons has announced an opening for 2028—“the first luxury flag ever planted in the city.” And there are rumors, Lavin adds, “of other ultraluxury brands that will be announcing this coming year. You know them well.”
The ferment isn’t just purely touristic. I walk past what looks like an empty parking lot between King and Meeting streets, just south of the Gibbes Museum of Art. A sign says, intriguingly, “American Gardens.” What had been slated for an apartment development—on the last empty lot downtown—was purchased by Beemok and is being transformed into a one-acre public garden to be shared with the Gibbes, which will have a satellite exhibition space there, in an existing historic building that will be connected to the main museum by a sky bridge. “Think of the world’s great parks,” Lavin says. “Central Park in New York, Regent’s Park in London, the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. We studied what makes great urban spaces come to life. One answer: civic partnerships with universally accessible buildings that showcase art.” Even before the $1 billion expansion of Charleston’s airport gets underway, which will enable the city to handle far more international travel, there is no doubt that Charleston is playing in the big leagues.
Had my stay only been longer (a typical lament), I could have partaken of more of Charleston’s cultural happenings. I managed to just catch the three-day Lowcountry Jazz Festival at the Gaillard. But the 10-day Charleston Literary Festival was happening in November, centered on downtown’s historic Dock Street Theatre with participation by Pulitzer Prize–winning authors and receptions for participants and attendees at some of Charleston’s finest old homes. (It also included an opening party modeled on Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.) “We’re giving the festival a distinct international edge this time,” said Sarah Moriarty, its executive director. “There’s a fomenting feeling of ‘anything is possible.’ There is really nothing like it in the entire country.”
I believe it. Two years ago I attended Spoleto Festival USA, the 17-day performing arts extravaganza, under its new director, Mena Mark Hanna, which always kicks off on Memorial Day weekend. One evening, in the College of Charleston’s Cistern Yard (the festival takes place in more than 10 city venues), I watched Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese musician, composer, businessman, and politician, whom Rolling Stone once described as “the most famous singer alive” in much of Africa. “Oh yes, that was a big get,” says Hanna. “And the setting! At night, with a white-columned early-19th-century building as backdrop, in the midst of 500-year-old oak trees covered in Spanish moss, the cicadas screaming in the background. Highly evocative!” Exactly as I remembered. The audience, Black and white, went wild.
The 2025 festival (tickets go on sale in January) will host the world premiere of a six-hour immersive performance boldly titled The History of Life, by composer Dylan Mattingly. “It will include a communal meal,” Hanna says. “It will be like going to a wedding with 300 people you don’t know. This festival attracts the whole world to Charleston. You’re allowed to be ambitious. I’m fired up about our future.” I’m going to look into those Pinch long-stay residences. And the Dunlin, of course, with its marshes and silence, is only 20 miles away.
IN STORE
King Street has some big brands, but also plenty of sophisticated local surprises.
Hart Jewelry A steady stream of shoppers are making a beeline to 650 King to assemble gold-plated custom charm necklaces, which, their creators (above) say, “look as good as they make you feel.” People were having fun in there— do it in person, not online. It’s a whole experience.
Marsh & Magnolia Ditto this custom hat bar at 404 King, on the street level of Hotel Bennett. The people I saw at Hart were here, too; it seems to be a circuit. Buy a felt or straw hat off the shelf, or personalize it right there.
IBU Movement This collection of luxurious garments and home goods at 183 King is produced by women artisans around the world, adapted when necessary to Western silhouettes. Ibu helps support the makers by bringing traditional crafts to a broader marketplace, and you get beautiful, often one-of-a-kind pieces.
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Klara Glowczewska is the Executive Travel Editor of Town & Country, covering topics related to travel specifically (places, itineraries, hotels, trends) and broadly (conservation, culture, adventure), and was previously the Editor in Chief of Conde Nast Traveler magazine.