During this summer’s Bear Festival, postcards handed out to attendees announced the next chapter of ownership of the McCleary Hotel.

Old Growth Fir Properties LLC, whose managing members are Matthew and Lorena Maurer, is the new owner. Built in 1912, the McCleary Hotel was previously owned by Penny and Everett Challstedt who are well-known members of the McCleary community.

Former local teachers who gradually moved into property renovation, the couple brings years of experience to the McCleary Hotel restoration. The buildings we buy have “something wrong with them that makes other people not want to live in them,” said Lorena. Through their work, the buildings are turned into rental properties that offer long-term, mid-term or short-term options. The purchase of the McCleary Hotel “is kind of a natural evolution,” she said.

Even at 113 years old, the McCleary Hotel is not the oldest building they have restored; the oldest home they renovated was a 1906 house in Hoquiam. The inspiration for the company name is because many of the buildings that the Maurers have renovated are filled with old-growth Douglas-fir, which they are finding in the McCleary Hotel too.

What follows is a conversation with Lorena that has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: What prompted your interest in the McCleary Hotel?

Maurer: [As educators] during the summer, we were always doing a project. We’d buy a house that couldn’t be lived in and fix it up and rent it out to somebody, so we kept doing that.

Matthew came from a history of renovating houses, and I came from a background of being interested in it too and being an accidental landlord when my family grew too big for the house that we lived in and bought another one.

We enjoy working with our hands and enjoy making things better for our community.

Question: When did you form Old Growth Fir Properties LLC?

Maurer: We actually formed that company in order to purchase this building. It’s very difficult to get a loan on a commercial property, and commercial properties are valued by how they perform as a business. There weren’t records for this as a business and so it was very difficult to purchase the building.

Question: During the restoration, have you found any quirks that you didn’t anticipate?

Maurer: I knew it was a really tall building, but I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to get all the way to the top to paint. We’re actually renting a boom lift from East County Rentals, Inc. to finish the painting because we’re doing the work ourselves. We’re thinking if we have a boom lift that goes up 40 feet plus tall, then we ought to be able to get the fascia boards.

There’s a concrete foundation under [the hotel], which when we did our inspection, I was surprised by actually. Having worked on houses across Grays Harbor, they’re always on post and beam foundations or post and pier foundations.

When we had that house in Hoquiam, I kept looking for gold bars because they found $33 million in gold bars in those houses. But probably the biggest treasure is just that [the Challstedts] sold the building with its entire contents. We have dinnerware and glassware and flatware to serve 60 people, and we have over 200 pieces of furniture that were sold with the building — over 100 of them were original to the building.

We have these beautiful oak inlay desks that were built for the building. They’re stamped on the back, McCleary-Chicago-Portland, because they were designed in Chicago and then shipped to Portland and built specifically for the hotel. You pull the drawer out and, instead of having a drawer, it’s a writing surface. And then you pull it out a little further and there’s a spot to put the ink and the quill.

The dressers in the rooms are also original. They’re stamped on the back and they’re just in such great condition, 113-year-old furniture, but the mirrors are clear and the dressers are in great workable shape. And some of the original brass beds are here at the hotel. Of course, we’re putting new mattresses and box springs; we don’t want to sleep on 113-year-old mattress.

We’ve had a lot of great donations of things, I almost would call a donation, because somebody gave it to me inexpensively because they knew it was going to the hotel.

Question: What is the vision for McCleary Hotel?

Maurer: What I want to create is an opportunity for connection. It could be connection with your friend who you’re here with, or your partner who you’re here with, and it could also just be connection to place and time and space.

Or it could be connection to yourself. Or your pet, because we’re going to be pet friendly. Or just meeting new people and having them feel like they’ve always been your friends, you know?

One of the things I like about the way the gathering hall is set up is that it’s family-style. That connection piece is really what I want people to be able to experience.

Question: Do you anticipate the hotel will serve both locals and visitors?

Maurer: I do. We did a lot of feasibility study components before we started. We developed some avatars of who our potential guests would be. Our initial underwriting and the underpinning for being able to know that we’re going to be successful here is that we can rent spaces to mid-term travelers, the traveling nurse or traveling respiratory therapist or whoever, who might be in town for like a 13-week contract. [Although family-friendly, only adults can stay as overnight guests.]

We know that need is here, that people need to be able to stay in our community to help take care of members of our community. We’re also close to the Legislature, so we anticipate maybe during the legislative session that folks who come and need to stay here while the Legislature is in session.

Longer term, we have a vision for the building of creating that space for people to come and have a retreat and relax. We’re going to build some spaces in the inside and outside of the building that help people turn off and relax.

We’ve already got a fire pit outside. We’ve got garden benches in the little secret garden area. We have a room here on the main floor that I’d like to turn into like a micro yoga studio or meditation or it could be used as a training room.

We anticipate at some point having events here, maybe starting next summer. I’d like to put in an outdoor spa area. My dream for it is that it has a wall of basaltic rock that has water flowing down into a hot tub, and there’s a cold plunge and a sauna, and also a cold rain shower and a hot rain shower. A big building would cover it so you can still see the night sky, but you’re not going to get rained or snowed on. That space will be available for folks who stay at the hotel, but also potentially day use.

Question: You definitely have a vision for the hotel.

Maurer: I’m really good at dreaming of visions, and I’m pretty good at making them happen.

Question: Are you on track for the grand re-opening in November?

Maurer: Our tentative date for our grand reopening party is Nov. 8. We hope that during the day we’ll be able to give tours because, historically, the folks who owned the hotel gave tours during the Bear Festival and we weren’t able to do that this year.

We’d love to give tours to families and community members who are interested.

In the evening we’ll have a ticketed event, which is going to be a Great Gatsby-style, Roaring ’20s party, that will be a fundraiser to build accessibility for the building.

Question: Was McMenamins a source for inspiration when approaching the restoration?

Maurer: Matthew and I are big fans of McMenamins, but as we have gotten into [the restoration], there’s this push and pull of what do we do to this building and how do we maintain it as a historic building without it being a museum.

We have cool photos that are very museumy, but this is not a museum. This is a living, breathing building that people are going to enjoy and come to and be able to visit. McMenamins really informed our thought process about that because they do take really cool buildings and they manage to breathe new life into them and have the history of it.

Our process for renovating buildings is to use as much of the original stuff as possible and not just pull things out unless they’re not irreparable or don’t go with the mission for the building or the original building.

Question: What’s been Penny and Everett’s reaction to seeing the work being done and knowing your vision for the hotel?

Maurer: I think they’ve been overall really excited about it. When Everett drives by, we’ll be like, “Hi, come on!”

Matthew and I are just so grateful that they did such a good job restoring the building and keeping it in good shape. The work that they did to restore the building is going to live on.

To follow the McCleary Hotel restoration, visit https://mcclearyhotel.com/.

Salt and Slate Marketing The McCleary Hotel will offer rooms that are available for overnight or longer stays. Some of the rooms feature furnishings, such as dressers that were specifically built for the hotel, and the original brass beds.