May 16, 2026

The Last Independent Inns of Nantucket

Twenty years ago, Nantucket had dozens of family-run inns. The island was a cottage of small hospitality — a sea captain's house with six rooms, a whaling-era boarding house with eight, an innkeeper named Mary or Ken who'd been there since the Reagan administration. Booking was by phone. Breakfast was on a porch.

Then Lark Hotels showed up.

Lark Hotels is a New England-based boutique-hotel operator that now owns 30+ properties across the Northeast. On Nantucket, they run the Greydon House, the Union Street Inn (which they acquired in 2023), the Veranda House, the 76 Main, the Stumble Inne, and a handful of others. They also operate Faraway Hotels, their sister brand, which flies different signage on some of the same properties. If you book a "boutique Nantucket inn" without looking at the ownership page, you are very likely booking a Lark property.

Lark properties are perfectly fine hotels. Some are very good hotels. But they aren't independent, and the ≤5-property rule puts them firmly in the chain column.

This is the short list of Nantucket inns that are still independent — still family-run, still single-property, still the kind of hotel where the owners are on the property.

1. Union Street Inn — Nantucket Town

Update 2024: Union Street Inn was acquired by Lark Hotels in 2023. Ken and Deb Withrow, who ran it as innkeepers for two decades, sold the property. For the purposes of this list — which measures ownership at time of publication — Union Street Inn is no longer on the independent list.

The honest note: under Lark, the inn still reads as boutique-quality and the physical property hasn't changed. But the category has. We're leaving it on the list with an asterisk for context, not as a recommendation.

2. The Martin — Nantucket Town

The Martin (formerly Martin's Guest House) is thirteen rooms on Centre Street in the heart of Nantucket Town. Family-run for decades. Breakfast served on a porch overlooking a garden. The kind of inn that's been booking summer regulars every August for thirty years.

Independent. Single property. The innkeepers live on-site.

Book this one.

Beyond these two, the math gets hard

We'll be blunt: the list of genuinely-still-independent Nantucket inns is shorter than most visitors expect. Beyond The Martin, the independent inventory on the island has consolidated aggressively in the last decade. Most of what Google surfaces as "family-run Nantucket inn" is now either:

A Lark or Faraway property with original branding preserved
A short-term rental operation branded as an inn
A B&B with 2–4 rooms that is independent but operates below the scale we typically cover
A historic property in transition (recently sold, recently renovated, recently rebranded)

There are still a handful of genuine small independent inns — the 6-to-10-room properties with a single innkeeper family, often not listed on major booking platforms, often booked by direct email and phone. They exist. They don't advertise aggressively. If you have an island friend, ask them. We're not going to list them here in a form that would send thousands of bookings to a two-person operation.

Why Lark took over Nantucket

This is the part worth understanding if you care about the story.

Nantucket's hotel economics are brutal. The island season runs functionally six months (May through October, peak mid-June through Labor Day). Labor costs are among the highest in the Northeast — staff housing is the bottleneck on every island operation. Insurance, regulation, and maintenance costs on historic buildings are high.

Which means: running a single-property inn profitably on Nantucket is hard. Running a portfolio of properties and sharing back-office costs across them is substantially easier. Lark's expansion on Nantucket isn't a hostile takeover — it's a consolidation the economics were always going to drive.

The independent inns that survive tend to do so because:

The family owns the building outright, not financed
The family lives on-property and provides much of the labor
The family has been doing this for two generations or more
The property is well-known enough to fill without big booking-platform exposure

That's a small club by construction.

What to book if you want genuinely independent and can't get The Martin

Honest options in declining order of confidence:

The Martin if you can get a week
Direct-to-owner small B&Bs found via referrals
A short-term rental in a historic home (with all the caveats that come with short-term rentals)
Book a Lark or Faraway property and accept the trade-off — they're still quality hotels, just not independent

We're not going to dress this up. If independent ownership is the hill you're picking for your Nantucket trip, your practical options are The Martin or the rental market.

The adjacent-island alternative

Martha's Vineyard still has more independent inn inventory per capita than Nantucket. If your heart's set on a New England island and independence is the filter, the Vineyard is an easier island to meet it.

See our full Martha's Vineyard page for the independent list there.

For an even quieter alternative: Block Island still has several independent inns, as does the Elizabeth Islands cluster (Cuttyhunk primarily). Both are meaningfully harder to get to.

The bigger question

The Lark consolidation of Nantucket is not a scandal. It's the result of economics that were always going to drive this outcome. The question worth asking is whether the category of "independent family-run inn" is still a viable business model on an island like Nantucket in 2026. The evidence suggests barely.

Which makes The Martin, and the few other genuine independents still standing, something closer to a preserved species than a category. Book them accordingly — with respect for what it takes to still be doing this, and with the understanding that any given one of them may not be independent by the time you book your next trip.