Lehmann House Bed & Breakfast

Lehmann House is the sort of bed and breakfast that justifies the phrase: an 1893 Victorian mansion on Benton Place, the private street at the heart of Lafayette Square, run as a guest house for some thirty-five years.

Lafayette Square holds the largest collection of Victorian-era houses in the country, and Benton Place is its showpiece – a curving street of grand houses laid out around a central green, which survived the tornado of 1896 and the century of decline that followed. Lehmann House sits in the middle of it. The house was once home to Frederick W. Lehmann, who served as Solicitor General of the United States, and it has kept the scale and the fittings of that period.

Five guest rooms are let, each decorated individually with antiques – some with fireplaces, some with marble-tiled bathrooms and claw-foot tubs. Breakfast is the full version: fresh fruit, pastries baked that morning, an egg dish, breakfast meat, toast and jam, with coffee, tea and juice. Parking is provided, which in this part of the city is not a small thing.

What guests tend to mention first is the host. Marie Davies runs the house personally, and the conversation over breakfast is a large part of what people remember.

For a visitor to Cherokee Antique Row, Lehmann House is a short drive north – close to Lafayette Park, and within two miles of the Fox Theatre, Saint Louis University and the Gateway Arch. It suits anyone who would rather stay in a nineteenth-century house than a chain hotel, which is a reasonable instinct for a trip built around antiques.