What does the word staycation mean to you?

For me it means treating yourself: Packing a weekend bag, disconnecting from your phone, and booking a hotel.

But not just any hotel, booking a hotel that has some special element to it which makes you feel like you’ve escaped, when you actually haven’t left your home city.

Think about all of the things that happen in your life on a daily basis. Now thing about all the things you tell yourself you are going to make more time for: reading, pampering, wine nights, just relaxing. Are you actually doing those things, or are you just talking about eventually getting around to them?

This is the entire reason for a staycation! It’s your chance to say, I actually work my ass off, I deserve some ‘me time’. This is also you chance to stay somewhere that you may not normally stay when on a vacation.

The thing with living in or near a city is your hotel options can sometimes be abundant. So how do you know which one to choose? My advice? Look for the hotel that has at least one feature that none of the other hotels have, especially one that makes you say ‘holy s***!” when you see it.

The only place you want to be in PDX

There are a bunch of awesome hotels in Portland, and I’ve had the pleasure of staying in a handful of them. But there is only one hotel which has a hot tub attached to your room. I’m not talking about a room, in a series of rooms, which open up into a pool/hot tub area, I’m talking about rooms which have patios attached to them, and on each of those individual patios are private hot tubs!

This is what you get at Kimpton Hotel Vintage in Portland, and it’s called the Urban Soak Room. Besides the fact that having a wraparound deck with a downtown city view is already awesome, Hotel Vintage takes this up a notch with the addition of a Jacuzzi tucked away in the corner of your deck.

The lobby features a huge amount of street art and art created from wine bottles, because after all this hotel does have a slight wine theme to it. It’s this love of wine that pretty much guarantees you will end up with a glass taking in the ‘Spectrum of Wine’ flow chart in the back area of the lobby, or at the hosted evening wine hour held every night—wine time all the time!

I also went down to the lower level to check out the gym and during that exploring I also happened upon a wine cellar and tasting room!

It isn’t just your room that makes Hotel Vintage the ultimate staycation escape, it’s the wide variety of amenities the hotel also provides throughout your stay. These will vary from the 24-fitness center, which I just briefly mentioned, an on-site restaurant and two bars, a business center with complimentary services, and dry cleaning + laundry.

In the lobby of the hotel there is always infused water out, there are games like Connect Four and Checkers sitting out on the lobby tables as well, and each morning they have a DIY coffee and hot chocolate bar! This was an amazing surprise that I discovered in the morning, as it was not laid out on the website and no one told me about it at check-in. Even though there is a Peets Coffee and a Starbucks right down the road, and you can technically order room service, I suggest you get up, even if you are wearing your robe or sweats, head down to the lobby and be your own barista! They have a wide variety of types of drinks (coffee and tea and hot chocolate), multiple milks and creamers (including non-dairy), and even flavored syrups and toppings! They have mugs if you want to chill in the oversized chairs, or you can take your drink to go back up to your room. It’s seriously 100% better than even going to a coffee shop!

But as common and many of these amenities may seem, Hotel Vintage has decided to kick things up a notch and diverge completely with their own unique set of amenities.

Take your travel experience to a completely unique and different level

As I mentioned there is a hosted evening wine hour, but in addition to that the hotel hosts weekly live music shows, offers private wine tours, allow you to set up in-room spa services, loaner bikes for you to ride around the city, provide yoga mats in your room, and take ‘pet friendly’ to a completely new level.

I was told if your pet can fit in the elevator than it is welcome in the hotel, this is when the guy checking me in told me that a llama was brought in one time. But it’s not just Hotel Vintage. Every Kimpton property will not charge you extra for your pet, they offer plush pet-bed loaners, food, water bowls and mats, a concierge list of nearby pet-friendly restaurants, parks, groomers and pet boutiques, and courtesy bags for walking your dog. And let me repeat: they do not have a size/weight limit, a limit on the number of pets you bring, and allow your pets to attend the nightly wine hour!

Not only do they want your pet to feel at home, they also want you to feel at home and feel welcomed back to your “home” each time you visit. This is when I learned that if you find a Kimpton that you absolutely love and want to visit over and over again they will give you a small bag where you can place your personal items and leave them behind for your next visit! This way you don’t have to worry about forgetting an item, or using whatever quality of item the hotel decides to offer you. You can literally have the comfort of your own toothbrush, or face wash, or makeup, because you know it will be waiting for you.

Just off the lobby there is a winding staircase which leads you to the 2nd floor which features a game room complete with shuffleboard, pool, TVs and even a Wii!

A room you will never want to leave

Now I mentioned my awesome Urban Soak Room earlier, which really is a testament to how unique and awesome this hotel is, but the room I stayed is isn’t the only unique room in the hotel.

As I got off of the elevator to my room, and also while I was exploring each of the floors, I immediately noticed something super cool and unique. Each floor in the hotel is named after a different viticultural area from the Willamette Valley, and each of the rooms on the floor is named after a local winery. So even if you haven’t been to the Willamette Valley you’re getting a little ‘exposure’ to it.

A mind boggling fact about Hotel Vintage is that they don’t have a handful of standard room layouts for you to choose from, probably as evident by the room I stayed in. They literally have 97 different room layouts. 97! So there is no reason you can’t find something you will fall in love with. Even though they may have an insane amount of room layout options, no matter what you choose, you know you are going to be getting the same quality, as they have painstakingly made sure that each room has a curated bottle of wine, street-inspired art, and the MOST COMFORTABLE bed. Trust me. It was so comfortable this was one of the few times I’ve actually been able to enjoy sleeping in.

When pursuing the site, trying to decide what room I wanted to stay in, there were 5 that stood out to me:

URBAN SOAK ROOMS
Which is what I stayed in, are all located on the 9th floor, and feature an outdoor deck and hot tub

SKY LOFT ROOMS
Which feature 45-degree sky view solarium windows

LUXURY SUITES & IMPERIAL SUITES
Which feature double level layouts, sectional sofas (sometimes a sleeper sofa), 2-person deep soaking tubs, separate bedrooms, and either a wet bar or half guest bath.

KING RESERVE SPA SUITES
Which have a living area with a full size sofa, bedroom, dining room, and 2-person deep soaking tubs

There are even more room options than this, but these were seriously the most unique, and honestly for a hotel this size seriously surprised me that there were multiple options of each, rather than a cookie cutter normal guest room and suite selection.

Hotel Vintage seriously takes your stay to the next level. I mean where else can you find conservatory-style skylights, one of a kind graffiti artwork, and an insane amount of space? The Imperial Suites and Luxury Suites are over 1000 square feet!

Eat all the food and drink all the drinks

il Solito and the Bacchus Bar inside Hotel Vintage are so great and so well known that locals actually come for the nightly happy hour and amazing food. In addition to the amazing cocktails that you can have in Bacchus Bar (named after the Roman god of the grape-harvest, winemaking and wine, of fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre AKA Dionysus in Greek mythology) it also doubles as a tasting room where you can indulge in, you guessed it, all of the wine.

If you want to have a little more ambiance this is when you can head out to the lobby bar for the live music that happens every Thursday – Saturday evening.

The name of the restaurant, il Solito, means “the Usual,” which refers to that one favorite dish that you have that you tend to get every time you go to your regular spot. I took in the full experience and started my evening off with a couple of happy hour cocktails at Bacchus Bar and then had my delicious seared tuna pasta dinner from il Solito delivered right to my seat.

Why book anything else when you can have all you want & more under one roof?

This was the mindset I left Hotel Vintage with. I have stayed in some pretty cool places, never a resort, especially not an all-inclusive one, but Hotel Vintage was this for me.

Usually I get a cool hotel experience but I have to sacrifice a couple of things. Maybe the design is super cool, or they have cool amenities, but there isn’t a pool or hot tub. Maybe they have a really awesome bar and restaurant, but they don’t offer happy hour or a complimentary drink hour. Maybe they have bikes for you to use, but they don’t have a plethora of games to also entertain you.

Hotel Vintage had all of these things and more. This is how you want to do a staycation. The whole point is tucking yourself away somewhere comfortable for a couple of days, disconnecting from the obligations that add stress to your life, not having to getting dressed to get up and go out in public because you need something, and being able to completely embody the concept of ‘hygge’. What is this random word I just threw in? Well to me it is the one word to describe what a staycation should be and why Hotel Vintage is one of the few places that gets this concept.

hygge (danish)
”hoo-ga”
the feeling of cozy contentment and well-being through enjoying the simple things in life.

BIG thank you to the team at Hotel Vintage for setting me up with the most amazing room, the best food and beverage coma, entertaining me for days, and making it so that I could take the elevator easily up a couple floors to finish each night out with a relaxing soak in my very own hot tub!