Guest Rooms
At The Homestead, our family of four once took a pair of adjoining rooms right on the main level, with its own screen porch looking onto the hotel’s tower façade; we still talk about that stroke of fine luck. And if you want modern contours and design touches, The Homestead does boast a new guest-room wing that also contains its important meeting spaces. Have to say, however, that in general my guest rooms at The Greenbrier have been a little bit bigger and a little more deluxe. I tend to make my peace with (more than embrace) the famous Dorothy Draper décor, but that “Sleepy Time Down South” sign they post, asking for quiet in the hallways, is an all-time great Greenbrier touch.

Dining (Part I, country breakfast)
The Homestead breakfast buffet is the only setting in which I have: eaten grits; eaten fish before noon; eaten six different breakfasts in one sitting. At The Greenbrier you order a very fine breakfast off a menu. It just ain’t the same.

Dining (Part II, main-room dinner)
There is perfect scale and an urbane tone to the evening meal at the 1766 Grille at The Homestead. After many an impressive dinner in the immense main dining rooms of both resorts, I had an “aha” moment one night in the 1766, selecting this beautifully lit room as the dinnertime winner at either property. Then a few nights later I made my first visit to The Greenbrier’s Tavern Room, and found it equally elegant, with excellent service and splendidly prepared meals. Plus a top-notch wine bar and cellar. Dead heat?

Dining (Part III, side rooms)
The pulse of The Greenbrier is indeed its concourse of lobby shops leading around to the Dorothy Draper room, which with its white wicker and black-and-white tile floor is hardly your oak-paneled masculine setting. And so, for me to say it’s a fun place to eat a very good lunch must be categorized a confession. So be it. There is no correlative facility at The Homestead—its casual lunch offering is out of the main hotel by the golf practice range and the outdoor pool.