The History

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

— John Burroughs, American Naturalist & Essayist

Kenoza Hall aims to be an experience and a moment in time for our guests.
Not just a building, but an emotional memory.

There lives a place in everyone’s deepest emotional memory that is at once peaceful, comforting, energizing, and settling to one’s soul. It is a place that can heal at times or provide a safe place for contemplation at others. And even at other times, to just cause a smile to cross our lips. Our Grandmother’s kitchen. A summer cabin or cottage on a lake or the shore where the breeze has its own flavor.

No matter what the emotional context of the particular moment in life, this physical place provides a platform to explore it. When we close our eyes we can feel this place as much as we can see it. It surrounds us with warmth. It is the feeling of what happens to one’s body and mind when we find ourselves taking a deep, long breath and exhaling it. The effect is immediate and changes everything about us in an instant.

As the Armbrust family once wrote in a welcome letter to their guests

“We are happy to welcome our old friends back & we are glad to greet new ones.”

The History

Some of the earliest boarding houses in the Catskills were developed as far back as the late 1800s, serving as a weekend escape from the city. The Kenoza House was built around the same time and opened in the early 1900s by John W. Armbrust and best known for many years as the Kenoza Lake Armbrust House through much of the heyday of the Silver (1900-1945) and Golden (1945-1965) Ages of the Catskills, when the region was one of the most famous vacation destinations in the U.S.. By the 1950s, Kenoza Lake Armbrust House was one of 500+ hotels in the area.

Shortly after, the Quirk family bought the property and used it as their private residence - thankfully maintaining the building’s strong bones before Sims & Kirsten Foster of Foster Supply Hospitality purchased the property in 2017, reopening as Kenoza Hall in Summer 2020 after extensive renovations.