I wrote this piece about one of my favorite GNV entrepreneurs for Our Town magazine. You can catch it in the current issue. Many thanks to Warren Nielsen for the photos.
A funny thing happened to Cornelia Holbrook when she went off to Africa to organize Roads Scholars tours. “I fell in love with Kenya,” she said. “I ended up staying for over a year.”
Then 28-years old, and having spent much of her childhood exploring Ecuador, Peru and the Galapagos, she might have lingered in Kenya even longer. But then her mother, Giovanna, called.
Giovanna’s Gainesville company, Holbrook Travel, offered adventure and eco-tours throughout Latin America. But mom had a distinctly less exotic next stop in mind for her wandering daughter.
“You need to come home,” Cornelia’s Italian immigrant mother bluntly said.
Cornelia had purchased the historic Cushman-Coleson house, on east University Avenue. The once stately Victorian mansion, built in 1885, had been going to seed for years.
“When I got back” from Africa “I felt like I could do almost anything,” she recalled “And I’d always had a dream of opening an inn in a historic home.”
That was in 1992. Cornelia was 10 years out of high school.
“The house it was in shambles,” she said. “There had been a fire and it almost burned down. But little by little we brought it back.”
In 1993 the Holbrook family’s Sweetwater Inn opened with just seven guest rooms. That was 30 years, 4,000 weddings and celebrations, scores of corporate retreats, several Road Scholars tour groups and thousands of guests ago.
Cut to 2023. The Sweetwater Inn complex now consists of three historic homes set amidst lush gardens, fountains and a salt water pool. Moreover, in recent years, Holbrook has been systematically buying and restoring cottages on neighboring SE 1st Avenue and SE 6th Street.
To date she has added eight guest cottages. Not to mention an open air tin shed where she keeps a 1950 Chevy Power Glide Deluxe that once belonged to the wife of author Sinclair Lewis.
Initially nervous about borrowing the necessary capital, Holbrook’s cottage restoration plan turned out to have an unanticipated economic silver lining. “Covid hit and all of a sudden people wanted cottages more than rooms,” she said. “They were booking my cottages like crazy.”
You might say Holbrook has been on a mission to reinvent Gainesville’s Bed & Breakfast District. One historic home and cottage at a time.
“We wouldn’t have a B&B District without Cornelia Holbrook,” says Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward “She created from whole cloth what is at once a hospitality district but also has the feel of a neighborhood.”
After opening the Cushman-Coleson house, Holbrook family continued to add guest rooms. Cornelia had purchased another Gainesville Victorian landmark, the 1895 McKenzie House. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the refurbished McKenzie added another 5 rooms.
That was followed by a Greek Revival home next door built in 1905, also for the Coleson family. “The Colesons were an important part of Gainesville history when it was undergoing a boom, a renaissance due to lumber and the completion of the railway,” she said.
Holbrook’s cottages date from the 1920s and ‘30s and were probably originally built to provide workforce housing to support nearby hotels and businesses. Two were likely moved here from nearby Camp Blanding.
The inn’s North and South Florida cottages, acquired from the Matheson Museum, are decorated in styles that reflect specific area locals – Paynes Prairie, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Cross Creek, Island Grove and so on. The nearby Matheson Cottages were built by Sara Matheson, whose historic home is part of the museum that bears her name. Nora Belle’s Cottage is named for a woman who lived there for half a century.
Holbrook nearly decided to tear down two of her cottages. “I had approval from the city to demolish them,” she said. “I looked at them and and thought: What’s worth saving? I stripped down the wood walls made from sink (salvaged submerged) cypress and used them as flooring.” Now her Mills-Pound cottages are decorated to evoke the look and feel of nearby Windsor, Rochelle, Melrose and Hawthorne.
Holbrook said her two restoration priorities have always been “preservation and utility. “There’s nothing standard about the way our rooms look. Some are more traditional, some more modern. We’ve got a nice variety of styles and ages…Greek revival, Victorian, 1920s bungalow, Florida cracker.”
The Sweetwater Inn now includes 12 buildings. Holbrook has plans to add a new event center while continuing to acquire additional homes and cottages. “It will be a total of about 16 structures by the time I’m done.”
“These buildings are my children,” she said. “I really have no exit strategy” to leave the inn.
Ultimately, Holbrook says, she wants to help bring more workforce housing to the area. “We really need more residences downtown, but in keeping with the feel of the neighborhood. Not luxury apartments and not tacky, featureless apartment buildings.”
Jay Reeves, the Gainesville architect who has worked with Holbrook on many restorations, says the neighborhood is ripe for the sort of development she has in mind.
“There’s still room for a lot of infill,” he said. “There are still a lot of structures that need to be restored and saved. We are seeing more professionals moving in and reclaiming the neighborhood.” And being steps away from downtown is a plus. “It’s all about the destination.”
Having been trained right out of high school by the Swiss born Chef Elmo Moser in Gainesville’s old Sovereign restaurant, Holbrook continues to cook for her guests. “My mom was hardly ever home, she was always traveling,” she said. “That made me acting head of the household at a very young age so I did a lot of the cooking.”
Giovanna Holbrook passed away in January. Cornelia’s sister, Andrea, runs Holbrook Travel and oversees the family’s 500-acre Salva Verde eco-lodge, tucked away in a Costa Rican rain forest.
That Cornelia ended up discovering her life’s work back home in Gainesville after much globe trotting might seem ironic. To the contrary, she says her journeys “planted the seed” for what she wanted to accomplish with the Sweetwater Inn.
“My mother was my inspiration. She instilled in us the importance of conservation and preservation and sustainability. It would have been far easier to tear things down and start over.”
But that would not be the Sweetwater Inn way.
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