Open Haus

The 52-room hotel near Das Dutch Haus opens for business today.
By DON SHILLING
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
COLUMBIANA -- An open house will be this weekend at the new hotel next to Das Dutch Haus restaurant.
The Dutch Village Inn, 150 E. state Route 14, will be open to the public from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be at 10 a.m. Saturday.
The four-story hotel opens for business today.
It has 52 rooms and suites, two meeting rooms that can hold 50 people each and a banquet center for up to 300. It is expected to employ nearly 50.
Owners said they are hoping for 70 percent occupancy immediately.
Themes: Each of the six wings has its own theme -- Shaker, primitive, Colonial, mission, cottage or Victorian.
All of the rooms have been custom-decorated to express one of the themes. Shaker rooms, for example, have stained-wood furniture, white walls with pegboards and quilts on beds; the Colonial rooms have more elaborately painted furniture and wallpapered walls with framed artwork.
Standard rooms come with one king-size or two queen-size beds, a desk, satellite television, a speaker phone with voice mail, a data port with high-speed Internet access, a hair dryer, an ironing board and a coffee maker. Suites offer multiple phones and televisions, a separate room with a sofa bed, a kitchenette, a table with chairs, a fireplace and a bathroom with a whirlpool tub.
There also is a fitness room and a game room, and an indoor pool will open this summer.
The owners: Partners in the hotel are members of the Ray Horst family, who own Horst Packing and Das Dutch Kitchen, and members of the Ralph Witmer family, who own Witmer's farm equipment sales and construction businesses.
They also own Das Dutch Haus restaurant, which they bought in 1982.
They are modeling the development after other Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish-style tourist spots in Ohio and across the United States. They say the restaurant and adjacent Dutch Village shops attract 10,000 people a week and nearly 100 bus tours a year.