What Is a Catskills Scandi Motor Lodge? A Taxonomy
Somewhere around 2017, a new hotel category started showing up in the Catskills that didn't have a name. It wasn't quite a motel. It wasn't a country inn. It definitely wasn't a resort. If you asked ten travel writers what to call it, you'd get ten different answers — "design motel," "modern lodge," "upstate boutique," "cabincore," "rustic-minimal." None of them quite land.
The term we've settled on, internally, is Scandi motor lodge. It's the dominant hotel format of the post-2015 Catskills and lower Hudson Valley, and it's been copied enough times that it deserves a proper taxonomy. Here's what a Scandi motor lodge actually is, what it isn't, and which Catskills hotels qualify.
The definition, in seven traits
A Catskills Scandi motor lodge, as we use the term, meets most or all of the following:
- A mid-century motor lodge as the underlying building. Usually 1950s or 1960s, often previously abandoned or underloved. The hotel is a renovation, not a new build.
- Exterior cedar, pine, or stained wood cladding. Often with black-painted trim or a black standing-seam roof.
- A restrained Scandinavian palette inside. White walls, natural wood, wool throws, black fixtures, shaker-style casework.
- Wood heat. A wood stove, a fireplace, or — increasingly — a wood-fired sauna somewhere on the property.
- A strong graphic brand. Type-driven, minimal, often designed by a Brooklyn or Hudson Valley studio.
- A restaurant (or coffee shop, or farm store) that's part of the hotel's identity, not an afterthought.
- Twenty to sixty rooms. Big enough to feel like a hotel. Small enough that the owner still knows the housekeeper's name.
If a hotel hits five of these seven, it's in the category. Four and it's adjacent. Three or fewer, it's something else.
The founding examples
Scribner's Catskill Lodge — Hunter
The one everyone copied. A 1960s ski lodge across the road from Hunter Mountain, bought by Marc Chodock in 2014 and reopened in 2016 as — for all practical purposes — the hotel that defined the category. Cedar-sided, black-roofed, forty-odd rooms, a restaurant (Prospect) with a view that was the first to make the Catskills feel like it could host a serious meal again. Hits all seven traits. Full hotel page →
The Graham & Co. — Phoenicia
Older than Scribner's (opened 2012) and in some ways the actual founder of the genre — a twenty-room roadside inn in Phoenicia, renovated by Brooklyn restaurateurs into the first time the Catskills got a hotel that looked like it belonged on It's Nice That. If you want the pure origin story, it's here. Full hotel page →
The second wave
Eastwind Windham — Windham
Cedar and black, wood-fired sauna, Lushna tent cabins out back, a restaurant. All seven. Full hotel page →
Eastwind Oliverea Valley — Oliverea
The newer, more polished Eastwind sibling, with a more spa-forward posture. Still hits the category definition hard. Full hotel page →
Hotel Dylan — Woodstock
A 1970s Woodstock bi-level motel, bought by a Woodstock native and restyled by the Novogratzes. Turntables in every room. Playful rather than minimalist, but the bones are textbook motor lodge. Full hotel page →
The third wave — and the edge cases
Piaule Catskill — Catskill
Piaule is not a Scandi motor lodge. It's a new-build cabin compound on 50 acres, architect-designed from the ground up, which disqualifies it on trait one. But it shares the visual DNA — restrained palette, wood, black fixtures, minimalism — and it's often confused for the same category. We'd call Piaule its own thing: a new-build Catskills minimalist cabin compound. Related genre, different family. Full hotel page →
Foxfire Mountain House — Mount Tremper
Hits most of the traits on exteriors, fails on interiors — Foxfire is warmer, layered, more maximalist, leans closer to what we call upscale bohemian. Not a Scandi motor lodge. Full hotel page →
Camptown — Leeds
From the Rivertown Lodge owners. A 2024 new-build that looks like a Scandi motor lodge from the outside but is technically a ground-up project, not a renovation. Borderline case. Visually the category is absolutely its reference. Full hotel page →
The Henson — Windham
A 2024 reimagining of a 1918 Windham hotel. The building is older than the category requires, so technically outside the strict definition, but the interior palette and posture are Scandi-motor-lodge squarely. Full hotel page →
The Bend Resort — Phoenicia
Five adults-only micro-suites on the Esopus, restrained-palette interiors, riverside cedar. A very tight five-out-of-seven. Full hotel page →
Why the genre emerged
Three things converged between 2012 and 2016 to make this category possible:
- A glut of abandoned 1960s motels along Route 28, Route 23, and 9W — the old Borscht Belt highway lodging that never recovered from the 1980s decline.
- Post-2008 cheap upstate real estate, making it plausible for a Brooklyn-based creative operator to actually buy one.
- A design language already in circulation — Sweden's Treehotel, Ace Hotel's Palm Springs, Dwell magazine's editorial imagination — that told people what the renovation could look like.
The Graham & Co. put those three ingredients together first. Scribner's made it mainstream. Eastwind made it a family. And by 2022 every new Catskills opening had to either occupy the category or deliberately reject it.
Is the genre over?
Probably not — but it's mature. The pure expressions (Scribner's, Graham, Eastwind Windham) are ten years old and aging gracefully. The new entrants (Camptown, the Henson, The Bend) are refinements more than reinventions. The next wave in the Catskills is more likely to be either the cabin-compound model (Piaule, the Leeway) or serious country-inn restorations like Seminary Hill and Kenoza Hall.
Which is a long way of saying: the Scandi motor lodge won, and having won, it's become the ambient Catskills aesthetic rather than the disruptive one. Use it as a useful category label, not a compliment or complaint.