Courtesy Mills House
At mealtime, groups have several in-hotel eating choices; one of those, the Tea Cozy, a local favorite for Sunday brunch, can seat 45 for a breakfast or lunch meeting. Many downtown restaurants are an easy walk from the hotel. Among them are sister restaurants Magnolia’s, with private dining for 130, and Cypress, home to James Beard-nominated chef Craig Diehl and a 4,500-bottle red-wine wall.
In 2010, Victoria Kueck, director of operations for the Society of the Medal of Honor, planned a five-day reunion for about 140 medal recipients and guests with meals at the Mills House and other sites.
“Our group included veterans with mobility issues,” she said. “Although the hotel had only a few accessible rooms, they converted as many as we needed with roll-in showers. All week, the staff’s Southern hospitality shone through.”
Although all its meetings were on-property, including one at Hibernian Hall, her group had a dinner at Boone Hall Plantation, a black-tie event at the Charleston Convention Center, a sporting event and luncheon at the Citadel, a luncheon at the USS Yorktown and a fishing expedition on Shem Creek, among other off-site events.
“If your group is interested in history, a function at the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon is a must,” said Hays. “And the Mills House can cater there.”
The hotel also caters at the South Carolina Aquarium, with space for 1,500 to 2,000 attendees and views of Charleston Harbor; just-built Founders Hall, with a 300-person capacity on a screened porch at Charles Towne Landing, where Charleston’s first settlers alighted in 1620; and at the Citadel Beach House, oceanfront on the Isle of Palms.
Charleston was voted Top U.S. City in Conde Nast Traveler’s 2011 Readers’ Choice Awards, and the many activities for visitors are part of what makes it so.
The Mill House concierge can arrange all sorts of outings: golf on Kiawah Island, where the 2012 PGA Championship will be held in August; boat jaunts across the Cooper River to Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum or across Charleston Harbor to Fort Sumter, site of the first shot of the Civil War; kayak and canoe eco-tours; and day trips to plantations, such as Drayton Hall for a behind-the-scenes connoisseur’s tour, or to Middleton Place, once the home of the wealthiest family in North America.
Numerous walking tours leave from the hotel: historic homes and gardens tours, Civil War history tours, antique-silver tours, ghost tours and culinary tours. Guests can even take an after-supper tour of the hotel and hear those walls talk history. After all, this gentle Southern city and her Mills House Hotel share oft-told stories of the past that never grow old in the telling.
