Wealthy living is a foreign country, one to which the passport is the expectation that you will be served. You can call that entitlement, or privilege, or ease earned by work or birthright, but its existence depends to a large extent on the invisibility of those doing the serving. The strain must not show; duty must not appear to be a job. That requires a certain amount of complicit blindness in those being served, of course — a conviction that these people like us for more than our money.
A visitor to this country — say, a reporter who has (gladly) accepted an assignment to write about two high-end resorts in Kennebunkport — may find the tacit relationship between the monied and serving classes equally flattering and strange. To have a haute cuisine lobster roll brought to your room upon check-in is a luxury, yes, but to expect it is to dull the pleasure of the moment. To see it as something new, as an act both rare and well done, is to begin to appreciate the elusive, possibly illusory graciousness such resorts labor to maintain. It’s a graciousness that at its most sublime can approach art.
The idea was to compare two special places: the White Barn Inn in downtown Kennebunk, established in 1973 in an 1820 boarding house, and Hidden Pond, opened in 2008 several miles outside of town. The old and the new, the dowager and the upstart. Both have the requisite world-class restaurants run by top echelon chefs, both have on-site spas. Yet they couldn’t be more different in style, vibe, location, and details.
At the entrance to Hidden Pond is a sign that says “Drive Slowly — Breathe Deeply.” It’s ever so slightly a command. The resort takes up 60 acres of woods off Route 9 and is arranged as a scaled-up version of a rustic lake association — “On Golden Pond” filtered through nostalgia and made perfect through design. Sixteen two-bedroom cottages with names like “Periwinkle” and “Fawn’s Pass” (and a price tag of $1,400 per night in high season) sit along winding drives, along with 20 one-bed bungalows ($700 per night) and the resort’s signature restaurant, Earth, a destination in its own right.
My wife and I were in a bungalow aptly named “Serendipity,” with an outdoor shower, a sunny screened porch, and wood accents everywhere. The chandelier is made of driftwood, the bedside lamp’s a birch log, the mantel is a railroad tie. Little wood-y things adorn the walls. I find myself wondering about the people whose job it is to design and create these objects. Do they have a title? Woodiste? Driftiere? Lumberologist?
Here’s how well designed the place is: Even the bathroom lighting is flattering. Outside in the lazy resort roadways, squads of Caribbean cleaning ladies pass groups of children playing lacrosse. Middle-aged men sit by the pool checking their e-mail. A vintage Ford Country Squire sits parked before the main lodge with a surfboard strapped on top — another accent, along with the “battered” handmade signposts directing visitors to various amenities: The general store, the flower garden, the bike barn.
It’s a bit much. The problem is that those old family summer compounds weren’t perfect — they were seriously funky, cracked by generations of living and lore. It was those imperfections, which weren’t designed but just happened, that drew people back year after year. At Hidden Pond, I find myself quietly treasuring evidence of genuine damage: a frayed towel edge, a dented coffee thermos, a beach bike that’s an actual piece of crap instead of faux crap.
A passage in a Ruth Ozeki novel my wife is reading seems suddenly weirdly relevant: “The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience.” In other words, give this place a couple of decades to settle in.
But the staff, which appears to be a mix of professionals and college kids, is exceptionally pleasant and hard-working, and the perks are peak: An early morning yoga class by the pond for my wife to enjoy, a spa treatment that requires this reporter to be wrapped like a burrito in French green clay and seaweed for the first and probably last time in his life. The spa facilities are housed in small wooden sheds, unprepossessing on the outside and crammed with unguents and ointments inside. My masseuse is a local woman who has seen the Kennebunk area inch closer to the Hamptons over the years; we compare notes on college-age daughters and then I shut up and let her do her thing.
And there’s the farm-to-table Earth, which is simply one of the best places to eat in all of New England. My wife and I were here about five years ago and had dinner a deux in a revamped garden shed overlooking the pond (which, come on, isn’t all that hidden). This time we joined the other diners on the porch of the main dining room, which is as be-lumbered as the rest of the resort, to the point of a light fixture made from an apple tree hanging upside down from the ceiling. Soothing lounge music percolates through the space. Maybe it will disappoint you when I say I had the burger, but I know that it’s the best burger I’ve ever had. (My wife had the salmon with figs and nasturtiums, if it makes you feel better.) After dinner, executive chef Justin Walker sat at our table and amiably talked to us about his Nigerian Dwarf goats.
A short bike or shuttle ride away is Hidden Pond’s sister hotel, the Tides Beach Club, across the road from Goose Rocks Beach. We lolled there for a few hours in the morning, listening to New Yorkers complain about the homeless, and then we packed up and drove into town, where we checked into The White Barn Inn.
It was as if we’d stepped from “On Golden Pond” into “Grand Hotel.” The inn is a member of Relais & Châteaux, an association of 500 or so individually owned luxury hotels and restaurants around the globe; the group represents the top of the top, and with the designation comes not snobbery — at least not at the White Barn — but a pride in creating an atmosphere of taste, discreet opulence, and an individualistic approach to high-end service. Almost everything clicks here, but the seams never show. That’s work, and it’s work done well.
Here is where we were greeted in our room by the lobster rolls, wrapped in rice paper with avocado and citrus-onion relish, along with a nice, fat, uncomplicated Chardonnay — the wine-pairing equivalent of George and Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.” The sommelier was a card; innkeeper Corinne Finn-Heyl was charming; her assistant, a bald, bespectacled gentleman, looked like he knew where all the bodies were buried and wouldn’t think of telling. Our $870-a-night room, in the May’s Annex building, felt vaguely Gothic, a veneer of olde New England bric-a-brac covering a core of creamy modern comfort.
The restaurant is in the barn, outfitted with floor-to-ceiling windows on either end, a pianist invisibly playing standards, and a “display loft” full of farm equipment that hasn’t seen a field in decades. Under chef Derek Bissonette — he recently replaced Jonathan Cartwright, who moved on after 20 years — the menu is a brave and largely successful attempt to revivify classic (i.e., stone dull) Yankee cuisine with modern twists. Except for my entree, a chewy monkfish wrapped in chewy Parma ham, everything about the meal was above and beyond, but what put the experience over the top was a server, Angela, who engaged us with the relaxed wit and genuine bonhomie that, ironically enough, comes from being a thorough-going professional. To work in the service industry, whether at a greasy spoon or a Relais & Château property, is to be an actor, and at the highest end the performance becomes indistinguishable from reality — certainly for the guest and, on good nights, even for the server.
That’s the trick that the White Barn Inn pulls off that other luxury destinations — including, to date, Hidden Pond — struggle to achieve, and it extended to our spa visit the following day, where both my wife and I felt at karmic one with our respective masseuses and, in retrospect, obviously weren’t. The trick is to make each paying guest feel unique and acknowledged, appreciated and special, through great effort that only appears to be absence of effort. To not return the appreciation is, perhaps, to not deserve it — no matter how much you’re paying.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
Correction: Because of a reporting error, Hidden Pond’s acreage was incorrect in a previous version of this story.