Grass Valley, California · Heritage Home No. 8 · 1894

Get a key to Chapter Eight. The first 100 are Founding Keys: founding rates and the first pick of dates when the hotel opens.

In 1894, this Queen Anne Victorian was the first house in Grass Valley with electric light, indoor plumbing and telephone.

Now, more than 130 years later, we want to celebrate its legacy and revive it once again, this time into a 6‑room boutique hotel, slowly, and mostly behind this curtain.

Two rooms are open now (book here), pre‑renovation.
The rest is being wired.

See the house ↓
220 Colfax Avenue: a pale green Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch, behind a white picket fence

220 Colfax Avenue · 1894

The house that went first.

In 1894, Elam and Mary Biggs built a Queen Anne with three things no house in Grass Valley had yet:

  1. Electric lightThe first house in town to switch it on.
  2. Indoor plumbingThe first with water inside the walls.
  3. A telephoneThe first that could ring.

The city later named it Heritage Home No. 8. Now we’re wiring it again, room by room, into a six-room hotel with a salon. We live downstairs.

Open now, as we found them

Two rooms you can book today.

Before the renovation reaches them, Empire and Gold Center are open on Airbnb. Your hosts live downstairs.