One season down, decades to go. The five-month-old reborn Ocean House in Watch Hill, RI just completed its first summer in business, and the five-star-quality boutique seaside resort has lived up to the hype. Business has been brisk, say the owners, and guest reviews on TripAdvisor and other social media sites show that it’s also been a hit with consumers. One guest writing on TripAdvisor called it “heaven on earth,” while another satisfied customer said, “The attention to detail is stunning.”

The Ocean House is no ordinary new-build resort. Led by New York financier Charles Royce, a group of local Watch Hill full- and part-time residents invested their passion and about $140 million in constructing the 72-unit Victorian-styled hotel on the site of a resort build on the spot in 1868. That property closed in 2003. Royce and his group initially wanted to renovate and reopen the original Ocean House, but it wasn’t structurally or operationally possible. The next best approach was a recreation that duplicates the look, feel and even sight lines of 19^th-century resort.

Centerbrook Architects and Planners and The Niemitz Group were able to use more than 5,000 architectural artifacts salvaged from the old hotel, and consulting photos and other reference materials, reused many of the items in their original roles. Among the reused items were oak-paneled elevator cars, the hotel’s reception desk and a large stone fireplace that was dismantled and rebuilt.

The design team used 1908 as a touchstone to recreating the past. Around that year was the resort’s heyday, so the team considered it a rough blueprint of how to duplicate the experience. Mostly, the owners and designers produced a hotel with all the amenities, services and facilities guests expect in modern luxury lodging: 49 oversized guestrooms, 23 private residences, several food and beverage outlets, 10,000 square feet of meeting and event space and a 12,000-square-foot spa.

One of Royce’s first decision was to hire resort veteran Daniel Hostettler as general manager. Hostettler previously oversaw Lajitas, a unique golf and residential resort along the Rio Grande River in west Texas.

Selling the resort, particularly as a four-season hotel rather than a summer-only experience, was a challenge. The resort markets itself as a leisure and wedding destination in the summer and fall and a high-level small group house in the winter. While Watch Hill is tucked away in far southwestern Rhode Island, the marketers use its location as an advantage. It is in a beach community but is only a two-and-a-half-hour drive to New York City and an hour less to Boston.

The hotel is part of the Preferred Boutique brand and uses social media extensively to complement its on-property and remote sales team.

To get a post mortem on the hotel’s first summer season, we chatted recently with Royce about his involvement in the project and its initial performance:

What were your motivations to develop this project?
It certainly wasn’t my long experience in the hotel world. This property was a primary edifice in this wonderful community, and I was sickened by the idea of it evolving into McMansions. It was that simple. A prior owner of the hotel was going to redevelop it, but he backed off. Then briefly a house developer had an option on the property, and that’s what finally motivated me to action. I couldn’t stand the idea the site would have five more super-large houses.

As a developer, what were the biggest challenges in developing this project?
The first challenge was whether it could be rehabbed, or did it have to be taken down. For a long time, maybe a year, we looked at the appropriateness of fixing it up. Finally and sadly, we came to the conclusion it wasn’t practical (to rehab it) and wasn’t even possible. It didn’t have any steel, any foundation, any plumbing. We finally decided to replicate it from ground-up so we took it down, built a foundation, started over and built it back up again. Basically, we replicated the look and feel of the hotel from the standpoint of the public rooms and the exterior and then added all the things you want in a hotel today.

Now that the hotel is complete and open, would you have done anything differently?
There are some extremely minor things, but in general the functionality has been great. We have a kitchen upstairs and a kitchen downstairs and we found we needed a somewhat bigger kitchen upstairs. We find it a little cramped, so we’re thinking how we might fix that. We have some mild awkwardness in how you get from some hotel rooms down to the beach. These issues are very minor and haven’t created any problems. They’re more in my mind than in anyone else’s.

Obviously, this is a tough time to be opening a new hotel, particularly at the upper end. Has it met your expectations from a performance point of view?
We got it open on time and came in definitely over budget, but that’s life. Otherwise, it’s far exceeded our expectations in occupancy and f&b (sales). We had an array of consultants on the project and we exceeded all their projections.

Was has been the reaction from the local community?
Overwhelmingly positive. This hotel had been an icon forever, but it had gone way downhill. If you go back 50 years, it was a primary center of the community, and that’s what it will be again.

Is the mix of business what you expected?
The big unknown is what will happen in January. We’re not having weddings on the beach in January. We’ll have to deal with that, but so far, so good. We’re getting corporate business during the week, the usual romantic weekend stuff, but we need to have a deeper weekend program. We’re not quite there yet.

How crucial is a strong off-season to the success of the property?
We’re planning to lose money in the off-season. I don’t know how you can avoid it. The off-season will take three to five years to build. We have great employees and you just can’t lay them off for the winter.

Any other tweaks planned to the hotel, services, f&b?
We’re going to add some squash courts. We have a dining room that lends itself to sectionalizing during the off-season, but that was imbedded in the program. We’re doing some minor stuff, like add a door where there was a little noise that bleeds from downstairs to the upstairs.

How will you measure success of this project, other than the bottom line?
I measure it in the experience of the user, which I want to be first-rate. It’s probably the toughest measurement possible.

Do you plan to develop any more hotels?

No. I did this out of love for the community. There is a group in the community redeveloping another inn nearby and I’m involved in that project in a very passive, secondary way.