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Planters Inn

Charleston, South Carolina, United States · Independent · Core Luxury

Planters Inn: ExteriorPlanters Inn: Planters Inn Charleston Photo GalleryPlanters Inn: Bedroom

Beside Charleston's City Market, an 1844 emporium restored after Hurricane Hugo is now the state's only Relais & Chateaux hotel: sixty-four rooms with Baker four-poster beds, and Peninsula Grill in the courtyard pavilion still sending out its twelve-layer Ultimate Coconut Cake. The name is older than the building, borrowed from an 1803 boarding house that once took in country gentlemen.

About Planters Inn

History

The building at 112 North Market Street in Charleston's Historic District has been continuously occupied since 1844, when it housed one of the city's most fashionable emporiums, a shop catering to the tastes of well-off Charlestonians with an appetite for small luxuries: harmonicas, sailor caps, whalebone petticoats, fanciful paper doilies, and the imported notions that reached the city through its busy antebellum port. The shop was a fixture of the commercial life at the corner of Meeting and North Market streets, a location that placed it at the heart of the city's social geography, steps from the City Market and a short walk from the wharves, churches, and townhouses that made Charleston one of the most architecturally distinguished cities in the antebellum South.

The building's commercial use continued through the decades after the Civil War, and by 1982 the emporium owner's heirs placed a preservation easement on the then-138-year-old structure with Historic Charleston Foundation, ensuring that its architectural character and historic significance would be protected in perpetuity. That easement was a statement of faith in the building's value and a hedge against the kind of casual demolition that had consumed so many comparable structures elsewhere in the city.

The name Planters Inn reaches back even further than the Market Street building. The original Planters Inn opened in 1803, several blocks from the current address, with a mission "to accommodate country gentlemen and their families with boarding and lodging", an establishment that thrived for fifty years before falling into disrepair after the Civil War. The name and its associations with Charleston's planter-class hospitality culture were revived when the hotel relocated to 112 North Market in 1983.

Hurricane Hugo, which made a direct hit on Charleston in September 1989 as a Category 4 storm, did not spare the building or the city around it. What followed was not only a physical reconstruction but a civic reimagining: across Charleston's Historic District, the destruction prompted preservation and restoration efforts that would reshape how the city understood and cared for its built inheritance. At Planters Inn, a preservationist-developer seized the moment and committed to a meticulous, multimillion-dollar restoration and renovation that the hurricane's damage had both necessitated and enabled.

The result, which opened fully in 1994, transformed the antebellum emporium into a 64-room boutique hotel with ten-foot ceilings, working fireplaces, heart pine floors, silk window dressings, and handcrafted four-poster beds from Baker's Historic Charleston Collection. A palmetto-shaded courtyard, reached through a gate off Meeting Street, anchors the guest experience in the garden culture that defines Charleston domestic architecture at its best.

By the mid-1990s, with the transformation complete, Planters Inn was invited to join Relais and Châteaux, the French-founded association of independently owned luxury properties, a membership it has maintained ever since, and which makes it the sole Relais and Châteaux hotel in South Carolina. Peninsula Grill, the celebrated restaurant that occupies the courtyard pavilion, has become one of the most recognized dining addresses in the American South, its twelve-layer Ultimate Coconut Cake achieving an almost totemic status in the local food culture. The AAA Four Diamond designation the hotel has carried reflects a consistency of hospitality that the 1803 founders, with their promise of "comfort, neatness, and convenience," would have recognized as their own.

The setting

Planters Inn stands at the corner of Meeting and North Market Streets, immediately beside the Charleston City Market, a National Historic Landmark stretching four blocks from Market Hall, established in the 1790s. The building traces to a mid-1800s emporium; placed under a Historic Charleston Foundation easement in 1982 and meticulously restored after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, it became the only Relais & Chateaux property in South Carolina. The City Market is one minute on foot, the Gibbes Museum of Art four minutes away, Waterfront Park eleven minutes, and Rainbow Row thirteen minutes by foot, positioning guests at the historic and cultural heart of the peninsula. 5.2 miles from USS Yorktown historic aircraft carrier.

Restaurants and bars

Experiences

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Awards

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