Belvedere Carriage House

To enhance this little time capsule, my husband and I re-landscaped the suite’s private backyard and placed a few rustic pieces of furniture near the large bay window so you can sit and enjoy the garden views. The suite still has a kitchenette and a laundry room—perfect amenities for an extended stay.

Between the comfort of the open space, the extra amenities, and its privacy, the Carriage House is the perfect place for an extended Cape Cod vacation, or a place to spread out for a weekend stay.

Give us a call or book online today! And checkout more photos on our Facebook page!

TripAdvisor GreenLeaders have met a set of environmental standards developed for TripAdvisor by a leading environmental consulting firm, with input from expert partners. The more green practices a hotel has in place, the higher its GreenLeader level, which is shown on the property’s listing on the TripAdvisor site.

Travelers can now search for accommodations that have a GreenLeaders status on the TripAdvisor site, and view a detailed list of environmentally-friendly practices that they can expect at each location.

“TripAdvisor GreenLeaders are leading the hospitality industry in making efforts to improve their environmental footprint,” said Jenny Rushmore, director of responsible travel at TripAdvisor. “We greatly applaud these accommodations and are pleased to share their eco-friendly practices with our online audience of more than 200 million travelers.”

The TripAdvisor GreenLeaders program was developed in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR^® program, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the United Nations Environment Programme. For more information, please visit www.tripadvisor.com/GreenLeaders.

Spring on Cape Cod

Spring flowers are popping up all over Cape Cod. After all of the snow and ice, the yellow daffodils poking out of the flowerbeds are welcome signs that sunny days and blue skies are soon come.

Matt and I can’t wait to stroll through the Rhododendrons in Bloom at the Heritage Museum in Sandwich, visit Yarmouth’s many outdoor art shows, or pick up fresh fruits and veggies down the street at the Bass River Farmers Market.  And we always look forward to the fireworks, this year held at Lewis Bay and Province Town.

If you are ready for a get-a-way, and want to know what’s happening while you’re here, check out The Belvedere’s all new page dedicated to Local Attractions. We’ve listed dozens of events as well as Spring and Summer activities, so book a room now, or browse the list for a vacation later in the season. We will keep adding activities as we discover them.

So, say good-bye to the dark days of winter and hello to Spring on the Cape. The Belvedere Inn is looking forward to your visit.

Today, I’m thinking about boxes. Not the little boxes that define what’s in and what’s out now. Fashion?  I can’t run an inn wearing stilettos. Trendy pet? Oops! I have a rabbit.

But there is a box that I fit into very comfortably: The “Have you ever quit a cushy job in the city and taken your husband and rabbit to Cape Cod to open a bed and breakfast?”  Check! That’s me!

Matt tending to the sugar snap peas in our first Square Foot Garden

My Favorite Box

But the box I’m dreaming about on this cold New England day is the organic Square Foot Garden box. A few years ago when I told Matt, my future husband, that I wanted to start a garden, he borrowed a few introductory gardening books from our local library. One of those books was the first edition of Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening.

That book is now my gardening bible. We designed our garden using the Square Foot Gardening method. It was beautiful, easy to maintain, and produced tasty organic food at the fraction of super market prices. It was such a special place to us that three years later Matt proposed to me next to squares of sugar snap peas.  That spring, we planted flowers instead of vegetables and held our wedding there too.

Our Future Box

Now that we have a new home and an Inn, it’s time to build another square foot garden. It is our hope that this new garden will produce more beautiful memories, as well as food for us and for our wonderful guests. (And Kanga the rabbit, too!)

We’re busy taking measurements, making plant lists, and planning breakfast menus around the harvests. We even hope to add garden fresh lunches for our guests next season (more on that to come!).

We’ve started two albums on our Facebook page, one of our first garden and the other of our new garden. We’ll add pictures of the new garden as it grows. The album is a little sparse now, but let’s be fair: it’s the dead of winter and what non-existent garden looks good when it’s nine degrees below zero?

Check the Box

So follow us on Facebook to see updates as we build and plant this spring.  And if you like what you see, check the like box!

All the best,

Sarah Fitzsimmons

Belvedere Inn Head Inn Keeper

Holiday decorations at The Belvedere

Our first holiday season at the Belvedere started on December 9th when we opened the Inn for the Bass River Village Cookie Stroll.  The Cookie Stroll, which benefits the South Yarmouth Library, brought 750 people to the Inn, despite the wet weather, to support this great cause and to enjoy the many beautiful homes in the Bass River community. Thanks go to the always fabulous cookie bakers, home greeters, and organizers for another big turnout!

To get ready for all the holiday events, a host of elves gathered in Santa’s workshop (a.k.a. our barn) during the Thanksgiving holiday. The elves made table centerpieces, decorated mini trees for guest rooms, and set up a train set to add a little choo-choo to the holidays. They made outdoor wreaths, indoor wreaths, and even an arrangement for the mailbox.

Belvedere Elves

And when everything was put-up, set-up, hung, or strung, the elves collapsed on the couches with cups of hot chocolate while my stepmother, a professional holiday decorator, added all the final touches.

So come join us for a little holiday cheer! We’re offering special holiday breakfasts and homemade cookies upon your arrival. While you’re here, enjoy all Cape Cod has to offer this winter season with Christmas strolls, parades, caroling, or even a polar express train ride.

Sandwich Glass Museum’s 3rd Annual Glassblowers’ Christmas

Heritage Museums & Garden’s Annual Celebration of Lights

The Polar Express

And many more!

To see photos of all the holiday magic here at The Belvedere, please visit our new Facebook page.

As Kermit the frog once said, it’s not easy being green. But at The Belvedere, green is one of our favorite colors. From non-toxic cleaning supplies to blown insulation, we are always thinking of ways we can reduce our impact on this beautiful

little piece of the world we call home.

For our first installment of, “Belvedere Greening”, we’d like to share how we are literally turning green and adding R-value – a measure of thermal insulation – at the same time.

We are enough lucky to have a LEED certified architect in the family, Sarah’s Dad Bill Glass. As our personal energy consultant, he tells us about new technologies and green construction ideas all the time.

Our favorite ideas typically require little to no construction, are inexpensive, and improve the esthetics of the house. So when he told us about a paint additive that can insulate walls, we were intrigued. The additive is comprised of tiny, hollow, ceramic balls. Because air is trapped inside the balls, it’s hard for heat to transfer from one side of the ball to the other. (Example?) By covering a wall with millions of microscopic air pockets, insulation is added that is as thick as the layer of balls. Pretty cool.

Our kitchen is the most difficult room to heat and cool because three sides are thin exterior walls with lots of windows, our kitchen. After taking down a few layers of wallpaper, spackling, and sanding we were ready to mix our paint. I donated an old plastic pitcher to the cause, poured in a pint of paint (Benjamin Moore’s Natura which is a non-toxic, no-VOC line) and a cup of ceramic balls and stirred gently. Once mixed, I poured the paint into the paint tray and painted away just like typical painting job. In an hour we had a Spumoni Green kitchen walls and an estimated 35% reduction of heat transfer.

With just a touch we can feel the difference between the walls with the paint additive and the walls without, it’s easy to tell that some improvement has been made. But the true test will come when winter settles in. We’re planning to test the house with a thermal reader that will tell us where heat is leaking from the house. Fingers-crossed that our painting efforts pay off. Either way the thermal testing turns out, we will still have a newly painted, fantastic looking kitchen.

New kitchen color with insulating paint additive

Through all of this change, one of the many unexpected gifts we have received are the words of encouragement and thanks from our guests. At the end of every weekend, when we opened the leather bound book in our parlor, a gift from our very first visitors, or found little notes of thanks in the rooms, the comments from our guests let us know we were on the right track.

We especially want to thank those of you who took the time to write about your experience at The Belvedere on travel sites as these have led others to our door.

As I look back on our first summer, I am filled with thanks and appreciation for all of our fantastic guests. You joined on our new journey and we will be forever grateful for your adventurous spirit. We so appreciated your words of encouragement that we reprinted a selection of our favorites. These and many others kept us going as we learned how to be innkeepers.

We are looking forward to seeing you all again!

All the very best,

Sarah and Matt Fitzsimmons

Paul and Mora’s Belvedere Note

Dave and Tammy’s Belvedere Note

Mike and Rebecca’s Belvedere Note

Peter and Kim’s Belvedere Note

Tim and Michele’s Belvedere Note

You made my day beautiful

Wonderful Hospitality!