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The Spa at Grove Park Inn

The spa at the Grove Park Inn is not a hotel spa. It is 43,000 square feet cut into the mountainside, mostly underground, built out of the same rock as the hotel above it, and it does not look like anywhere else in the country.

What is down there: a mineral pool, a lap pool set under 6,500 fiber-optic stars with music playing underwater, two waterfall pools that will happily beat the last eleven months out of your shoulders, contrast pools, eucalyptus steam rooms, saunas, separate inhalation rooms, three fireside lounges with blankets and tea, and a terrace outside with the mountains in front of it. Natural light comes through the rock in places. You will lose two hours without noticing. Until my visit this week to the spa at the Ritz Reserve at Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico, it was far and beyond my favorite. Now, we may have a tie.

Now the booking part, because this is where people get it wrong.

You can buy a standalone Spa Day Pass. Capacity is limited to hotel guests, and the good Saturday slots go early. That works if you plan far enough out.

The better move: book a treatment instead. A spa treatment includes all-day access to the pools and every amenity down there, same day, at no extra charge. So the massage is not an extra $200 pp on top of the pass. The massage is the pass, and you get an hour of bodywork attached to it. Book it the day you book the room, not the week you travel.

Three things that will save you:

• Arrive an hour early. They ask for it and they are right. The hour before your treatment, floating around near-empty pools, is the best hour of the day.

• Bring a swimsuit, leave the phone upstairs. No electronics are allowed down there, e-readers with cameras included. This is a feature.

• Eighteen and up, ID required. Plan the kids elsewhere for the morning.

Hours run 8 to 6 Sunday through Thursday, 8 to 7 Friday and Saturday. Reservations by phone. Twenty-four hours to cancel before it costs you.

T H E N  Y O U  P O P  I N T O  T O W N

Here is the thread nobody points out. The man who built the Inn built something else in this city.

E.W. Grove started the Grove Arcade downtown in the early 1920s and meant it to be the grandest building in the region. He died in 1927 with only the base finished. It opened anyway in 1929, all 269,000 square feet of it. The federal government took it during the Second World War and put the tenants out on short notice. Then it sat. The city bought it in 1997, and it came back as a public market full of shops, restaurants and apartments.

So the day reads as one story from two ends. A man's mountain hotel and a man's downtown market, both taken away from this city at some point, both back. Not a bad frame to carry through a town that spent the last year doing exactly that.

Give the afternoon to the Arcade and the blocks around it. Wall Street and Battery Park are right there. Pack Square, Malaprop's, the Asheville Art Museum and the galleries are a short walk in any direction. If you would rather drink than shop, the South Slope breweries are ten minutes on foot and this is still Beer City. If you want the making rather than the buying, the River Arts District took the worst of the flood and has better than two hundred artists back at work along the river, which may be the most worthwhile hour you can spend in this town right now.

Then get back in the car. You want to be on the terrace by seven.

T H E  I T I N E R A R Y

FRIDAY

6:00 PM · Check in. Ask for a Main Inn room if you care about the charm and character, a Vanderbilt or Sunset wing room if you care about the view.
7:30 PM · Dinner on property, and there are eleven places to do it. Vue 1913 runs Wednesday through Sunday. The Sunset Terrace does hand-cut steaks and seafood with the whole range in front of it. Edison will feed you well without ceremony. Do not go into town tonight. The point of Friday is not having to.
10:00 PM · Optional and worth it: Elaine's Dueling Piano Bar, Thursday through Saturday only.

SATURDAY

7:30 AM · Coffee. Walk the Great Hall while it is still quiet. Twenty-four-foot ceilings, two 36-foot stone fireplaces, nobody in it yet.
8:00 AM · Down to the spa. Doors open. You have the pools nearly to yourself.
9:00 AM · Treatment. Booked weeks ago, because you read this.
10:30 AM · Back in the water. Waterfall pool, then steam, then a fireside lounge and tea. No phone.
12:30 PM · Late breakfast or an early lunch. Blue Ridge does the farm-to-table version, the Spa Café does the version where you never put real clothes back on.
1:30 PM · Down the hill into town. Five minutes, which is the whole trick of this hotel.
2:00 PM · Grove Arcade, then Wall Street and Battery Park on foot.
3:30 PM · Pick one: the Asheville Art Museum and Pack Square, the River Arts District studios, or the South Slope breweries. Not all three. That is the mistake everyone makes.
5:30 PM · Back up the mountain. Change.
6:45 PM · The Sunset Cocktail Terrace. Get there before the light does, because the good seats go. If you would rather look at the city than the mountains, the Presidents Lounge faces the other way, out over downtown.
8:00 PM · Dinner. Sunset Terrace or Vue 1913 if you want the evening to stay slow, or Curate downtown if you want the hardest table in Asheville and are willing to drive for it.

SUNDAY

Morning · Biltmore, which earns a half day on its own and deserves better than being squeezed into Saturday. Or the Blue Ridge Parkway north of town. As of August 20 the open run goes from the Parkway visitor center at Asheville up toward Mount Mitchell, roughly 29 miles of it, milepost 355 to 384. Everything above that is still closed. Check the Park Service page the night before, because these segments keep moving.

W O R T H  K N O W I N G  B E F O R E  Y O U  V I S I T

Asheville is open, genuinely and all the way. Downtown, the Arcade, the River Arts District, Biltmore and the breweries are all back in service, and the town spent a hard year getting there. The most useful thing a visitor can do is exactly what you came to do, which is spend the day, and spend it in the places that rebuilt. Three practical notes. Book the spa treatment when you book the room, not after. Book Curate ahead on a summer weekend. And the Parkway is still partly closed: as of August 20 the open segment near town runs milepost 355 to 384, north of the city, with the stretch above it shut and full reopening across North Carolina expected late this year. Check the Park Service page before you plan a morning around it.

T H E  W E E K E N D ,  A W A R D E D

Where to stay. The Omni Grove Park Inn. Granite off Sunset Mountain, standing since 1913, and the only hotel in the Carolinas where the best room in the building is the 43,000 square feet underneath it.

Where to soak. The spa. Book a treatment, get the pools all day, arrive an hour early, leave the phone upstairs.

Where to wander. The Grove Arcade. Same builder as the Inn, finished two years after he died, taken by the government in the war, back as a public market since the city bought it in 1997.

THE HOME THAT FITS THE WEEKEND

Here is the part where I stop being a tour guide.

Sunset Mountain

The mountain you slept on has houses on it. Sunset Mountain runs up behind the Inn into Grove Park, which has been North Asheville's address since Grove was laying the first course of granite, and the ridge above it looks straight down the throat of the city. We sold a house up there in late 2023, north of six million, with downtown in the windows and the Blue Ridge behind it. It is the view in the photograph most people assume is a postcard.

That tier does not go on sale just because the wider market does. But the wider market did. The county median eased this spring, homes are sitting better than three months, and the luxury tier has real inventory to weigh for the first time in years. That is rare in these mountains, and it is happening while the recovery money and a national golf spotlight both arrive.

Our network of Real Estate Advisors handle Asheville from the downtown loft to the ridgeline estate. If a comeback city with real buyer leverage has you doing the math, the next step is a conversation, not a listing sheet.

S E N D  S O M E O N E  A  S A T U R D A Y

Every Weekend Escape is built to be forwarded. Send this one to the person who has been meaning to get back to Asheville and see how it is doing, the couple who honeymooned there years ago, the friend who would drive four hours for a stone terrace and a mountain sunset.

If a friend sent you this one, welcome. The Escape lands every Saturday at 8 AM.

The intelligence layer between where you are and where you belong.