The Hearth Hotel

Imagine staying at hotel where everything around you is handmade by local artists.

At the Hearth Hotel, visitors will be able to buy what they use in their rooms or take a class and learn how to make it for themselves. This unique social enterprise combines sustainable hospitality with community art to create hotel rooms where everything, from the food to the furniture, is handmade.

Miranda’s Hearth is designed to function concurrently at two intertwining levels. The non-profit Hearth Community will be a creative resource for the local community while the for-profit Hearth Hotel will be a functioning tourist and cultural center for visitors.

This two-layered model creates a sustainable, profitable community arts center that supports the local community while also promoting a communal and sustainable approach to hospitality. Our varied revenue streams will include memberships, hotel bookings, artwork sales, events tickets, building rentals for conferences and weddings, and class registrations.

Rather than following the traditional “build it and they will come” model, we decided to start by building the community first. That’s why we’ve spent the past five years serving 9,000+ people through creative community building events run by the Hearth Community.

From June 2015 – July 2016, The Hearth Community built a tiny house as a public art project on the front lawn of The Umbrella Community Arts Center in Concord, MA. In addition to building the house from scratch, we filled it with local handmade objects to showcase the functional forms of art that are often overlooked by traditional venues. Aubergine, the Hearthmade tiny house, now functions as our prototype hotel room demonstrating how different it feels to walk into a space where everything around you is handmade.