Resurrected Elegance: Blair Moore House
Blair-Moore House gives exceptional atmosphere, award-winning breakfast and Jonesborough to boot.
Ambling Jonesborough’s Main Street, just steps past the International Storytelling Center, you can’t miss a certain Greek Revival structure. It is stately and a little mysterious, like much of the historic architecture that surrounds it.
But the Blair-Moore House Bed & Breakfast is notable, and not only for its place on the National Register of Historic Places or its luxurious amenities that combine Old World indulgences with traditional Southern comforts. It is also a home that has been brought back from the edge.
Owners Jack and Tami Moore are proud to share the building’s story with guests. Built in 1832 as a private home, the property changed hands until the Moores acquired it in March 1993. It was a daring purchase—pictures bound in books in each room demonstrate the degree to which the structure was positively wrecked. Crumbling brick, rotted boards, peeling walls, and trash and debris littered every single room. The yard was completely uncultivated and overgrown with weeds
The couple moved into the house only two months after their purchase and began a massive restoration effort by hand. Additional pictures chronicle the transformation. Four years and six months later, the Blair-Moore House opened for business, just in time for the Storytelling Festival of October 1997.
A sense of celebration is evident in nearly everything at Blair-Moore house including each of the three exuberantly adorned guest rooms.
The two upstairs rooms flank the Moores’ residential suite. Visitors ascend a wooden staircase to the second level, with the lower half of the stairwell displaying a traditional-looking mural of an English hunting scene. The red plank floors of the upstairs landing hold a real bearskin rug, a cedar trunk of quilts, a number of decorative items, and entryways to either the Victorian Room or the Western–Native American-themed room.
The Victorian Room provides a more intimate version of the ambiance created in the downstairs drawing room and other, more public parts of the inn. Guests can close the door and visually escape into the muted peacock-blue walls and comfortably sophisticated furnishings. A bed with carved headboard and lace canopy is the focal point of the room, and beyond this lies one doorway to a private porch overlooking the manicured gardens of the rear lawn, and another doorway leading to the private bath and its oversized clawfoot tub.
Meanwhile, the Western–Native American Room offers a perfectly masculine counterpoint to the Victorian Room’s daintier décor. Deep red and clay tones are found here, along with impressive totems, statues and Native American artifacts collected by the Moores. The bed and private bath are equally sumptuous, and the private porch overlooks Main Street.
Downstairs—just past a table bearing complimentary port, sherry and chocolates and the guest kitchen with complimentary red and white wines and sodas—is one entrance to the Suite. Guests in this room also enjoy a private entrance on Main Street. The suite includes three rooms and a front porch on Main.
The front room of the Suite, furnished in deep-green leather, serves as a private living room with windows looking onto Main Street as well as a cultivated English garden developed by the Moores. The bedroom shares a similar view of the garden from plush velvet seating. This room is decorated in sunny yellow and French blue, and the tall canopy bed—which comes with its own step stool—is bedecked in fabric featuring scenes of traditional French life. An easily 8-foot full-length mirror stands in a frame in one corner. The private bath features a clawfoot tub as well as a separate standing shower.
Each morning, guests assemble in the dining room at 9 a.m. for breakfast, which Jack serves formally while wearing a fine suit. It’s an authentic experience—real china, real silver and remarkable presentation. The Moores clearly find joy in this. Tami has trained in the culinary arts with Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the Culinary Institute of America in New York, LaVarenne at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, and Johnson & Wales University while it was located in Charleston, S.C.
“Some of the menus, I’ve tweaked them over the years,” Tami says. “My specialty is pastries, but I try to create variety. We feature sweet and savory, something to appeal to everyone … I love to cook. I always have, since I was 2 years old.”
She proudly shows an orange apron her grandmother made for her as a child. “Any time we have the opportunity to travel, I like to take cooking classes there,” she says.
It’s easy to see why the Blair-Moore house has been recognized among the top five in Inn Traveler magazine’s “Best Breakfast in the Southeast” list for five years running and named number one for the first time this year. On the day of Marquee’s visit, the menu includes water spiced with lemon and fresh mint, collected from the Moores’ garden; fruit drizzled with honey surrounding a cup of sweet French cream; French toast stuffed with mascarpone cheese and topped with Grand Marnier-marinated fruit and either homemade maple or cherry syrup; sliced Yukon Gold potatoes in a savory provolone sauce; smoked ham and bacon; and toasted pecan and peach muffins, made from fresh peaches brought from NASCAR fans who stay at the inn every year during race weeks.
“This is the only place in the world where I eat French toast,” says Leslie Walker of Maryville, Tenn., in between bites. This is her 21st visit to the Blair-Moore house, and she is proud of her informally recognized “most frequent visitor” status. Other frequent visitors come from as far away as Boston and Baton Rouge, while the visitor from the farthest distance hailed from Russia.
After breakfast, it’s time to read the daily paper in the drawing room, lounge in rocking chairs on the expansive back porch, stroll the grounds or ask Jack to show off his workshop, where he makes “looking glasses” —intricately and artfully assembled mirrors, sometimes using antique glass. One building on the grounds contains furniture he’s restored, as well as some period furniture reproductions he has built by hand. “I like pre-Civil War Southern furniture, particularly from East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia,” he says, caressing the pieces of a sugar chest he is working on.
When it is time to say goodbye, guests will inevitably find it difficult to relinquish the large brass antique key that is necessary to get in the front door.
While you hold the key, you are an insider, privy to a private sanctuary. And that is difficult to leave behind.
Blair-Moore House Bed & Breakfast
201 West Main Street
Jonesborough, TN 37659
For reservations or more information, call (888) 453-0044 or go to blairmoorehouse.com.
Nicole M. Sikora is a freelance writer from Johnson City.
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