A friendship, a farmstead, and twenty-four years of the same conversation.

The Hyde Away has been on Mill Brook Road since New Year’s Day, 1949, when Sewall Williams converted a c. 1820 farmstead into the Ulla Lodge — named after Ull, the Norse God of Skiing, to offer lodging for Mad River Glen skiers in its first season. The building changed hands and names over the decades: Ulla Lodge in the 50s & 60s, the Snuggery in the 70s.

In 1987, Bruce Hyde renovated and reopened it as the Hyde Away Inn & Restaurant. In 2015, Ana Dan and her husband Paul Weber took over. The inn has been a working lodging property and a gathering place for the Mad River Valley for more than 75 years. The rustic character has been preserved through all of it.

I was working in corporate communications. The Hyde Away was just somewhere I’d end up to socialize, a place I kept coming back to. Good bar, good people, easy to stay longer than intended. That’s how you become a regular, and eventually a friend of the house.

Bruce Hyde and his wife Margaret Defoor needed a website. The web was still new, their marketing was still mostly word of mouth and the chamber rack. At some point we started talking about whether a website might help. It might. So in 2001 I built one.

That’s the whole origin story. No grand plan, no strategic pivot. A friendship and a practical problem, and the skills to do something about it.

The first site was static HTML — straightforward, appropriate for the time, did the job. Over the years it grew as the inn’s needs grew. A content management system to make updates to specials, events, and the menu more efficient. Then real lodging reservations, plumbed in. Then dinner reservations on top of that.

Each addition served something the inn was actually doing. Nothing was added for the sake of adding. The site has been rebuilt more times than I could tell you, each time a response to something real — a new ownership era, the shift to mobile, renovations worth re-photographing, a menu that changed.

When Bruce & Margaret sold to Ana & Paul in 2015, the site kept right on going. New owners, same building, same conversation about how to represent it online. That continuity is part of what the work has been.

Over the years I’ve done most of the photography for the site — the rooms, the bar, the dining room, the grounds in different seasons. Guests have commented on how accurate the room photos are. They get what they expect when they arrive.

That’s the whole point. A rustic country inn shouldn’t look like a boutique hotel online and then surprise you in person. The photography is honest about what the place is, and that honesty is part of why guests come back.