In Spring of 1927, this sixty-room hotel opened at the same time as the incorporation of the Town of Lake Lure, sister city of Lake Como, Italy, and the completion of the Lake Lure Dam that formed the lake, alongside other matching Mediterranean architecture: the Arcade Commerce Building, the Haynes Hill Mansion, and the original Lake Lure Schoolhouse, razed in 1982. During World War II, the inn provided rest and relaxation for officers of the U.S. Army Air Corps, while the Arcade Commerce Building housed enlisted men. The hotel hosted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Emily Post, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the cast of the original motion picture “Dirty Dancing,” and other stage and screen stars. In 2004, Hope and George Wittmer purchased and painstakingly restored it so that it once again embodied the graceful and inviting mountain charm of its first designation as “the little Waldorf of the south.”