Uniting timely design and authentic New England hospitality to reinvigorate the Cape’s hotel scene.

When Robert Blood was 28 years old, he bought his first hotel: a small, nine-bed inn in Kennebunkport, Maine. He saw it as a sort of “incubator kitchen,” where he could try out his modern and welcoming approach to hospitality. Now, over two decades later, Blood’s company Lark Hotels has expanded rapidly to nearly 30 properties in the US. None are quite as key to the brand’s roots as those in coastal New England, though, including four spanning the Cape and Islands.

Blood grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and came into the hospitality business while managing a small inn on Nantucket. He loved the intimate, personable nature of the property, and soon took the leap to buy the inn in Kennebunkport in 2004 to forge his own path in boutique hotel management. He kept tight control over the inn’s finances, leading it to become ultimately successful. That early success encouraged him to venture further, investing some of his profits in the Veranda House on Nantucket two years later. The business only grew from there. With his first few ventures, Blood simply picked places he already liked and wanted to spend time in. “Location is always a very specific thread that connects our properties. We want them to be in places that people want to be. It kind of just sounds like common sense, but it’s not always, because some people really want to create destinations, and that is not one of our goals,” Blood says. “We want to be really rich places for people to stay, in destinations they’re choosing to go to.”

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