EVERY HOSTEL HAS A STORY.
OURS STARTED IN ROME.
Two travelers, an old Vermont farmhouse and an idea that a place to stay could be about more than just a bed. More than fifteen years later, that idea still defines Hostel Tevere.
The Story Begins in Rome
Before there was a Hostel Tevere in Vermont, there were two travelers in Rome. Giles Smith and Sarah Wright met in Italy and eventually brought home an idea: to create the kind of place where travelers could stay affordably, meet people and experience Vermont in a different way.
When they opened the hostel in 2009, they gave it a name that reached back to where their own story began. Tevere is the Italian name for the Tiber, the river that runs through Rome.
With the Mad River running through their new Vermont home, a river-inspired name seemed fitting. And perhaps “Hostel Tevere” had just a little more romance to it than “Mad River Hostel.”
From Rome to the Mad River Valley
While living in Rome, Giles tended bar and gave tours of the city while Sarah worked as an architect. Both had spent plenty of time staying in hostels while traveling around Europe, and they began kicking around an idea of their own:
Why not bring that kind of experience to Vermont?
The Mad River Valley felt like the right place. Sarah had family in Warren and knew the area from years of skiing here.
In early 2009, they began searching for a property. That May, they found an 1839 white farmhouse on Powderhound Road, right at the base of the Sugarbush Access Road.
An 1839 farmhouse. A handful of custom-built bunks. And a new kind of place to stay in the Mad River Valley.
A Different Kind of Hostel
Sarah designed custom bunk beds that were made by a local welder, rooms were thoughtfully furnished, and travelers could stay in the Mad River Valley without paying resort prices.
But the beds were only part of it.
Downstairs, the hostel became a gathering place. Ski boots dried around the wood stove. Guests met locals at the bar. Stories from the day’s adventures were traded late into the evening.
At dinner, hostel guests sat down together for a family-style meal prepared by Sarah’s sister, Jessica.
The idea was simple: make it affordable, make it comfortable, and give people a reason to meet each other.
Would This Hostel Thing Work?
When Hostel Tevere opened in 2009, there weren’t many places like it in Vermont. Hostels were common in Europe, but the idea was still unfamiliar to many American travelers.
Giles and Sarah were betting that people coming to the Mad River Valley wanted something different: an affordable bed, good food, a welcoming bar and a place where travelers and locals could actually meet.
The first guests began proving the idea could work. Cyclists, skiers, students, couples and travelers passing through the Valley found their way to Tevere — often through word of mouth.
But with their first Vermont winter still ahead, Sarah wasn’t ready to declare victory.
“We’ll have to wait until the winter to see if this hostel thing works.”
— Sarah Wright, 2009
It worked
The Road to Tevere
In 2017, I spent six months on the road, traveling across the United States and Canada. The trip stretched from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, all the way to Key West, Florida.
Somewhere along those thousands of miles, an idea started to take shape.
When I got home, I sat down with my dad and told him what I wanted to do next:
I wanted to start or buy a hostel.
That conversation was in November 2017. I didn’t have a background in hospitality, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for. I just knew I wanted to create the kind of place I’d come to appreciate while traveling — somewhere affordable, welcoming and built around the people passing through it.
What followed was a year and a half of looking, planning and trying to figure out what that idea might actually look like.
Eventually, the search led me to Warren, Vermont, and a small hostel in an 1839 farmhouse at the base of the Sugarbush Access Road.
It already had the things I had been looking for: bunks upstairs, a restaurant and bar downstairs, and a place where travelers and locals crossed paths.
On April 30, 2019 — ten years after Giles and Sarah started Hostel Tevere — I became its next owner.
Their journey started in Rome. Mine started on the road. Both somehow ended up at the same old farmhouse in Vermont.
Learning as I Went
The early days. Learning the business, meeting the Valley and figuring things out as we went.
When I bought Hostel Tevere, I was excited — and also wondering whether I had just made a huge mistake.
I had never owned a restaurant. I had never worked in lodging. Now I owned both.
My very first guests were three siblings riding the Vermont Gravel Growler. It was raining, and after spending their days camping along the route, they were happy to have a roof over their heads. They asked if they could “fake camp” in their room and set up their tent inside.
It was a fitting introduction to hostel ownership.
The first year had plenty of highs and lows. Winter could mean guests in the house every night, while slower stretches could mean weeks without a single person in a bunk.
I quickly learned that running a seasonal business in Vermont meant enjoying the busy times — and saving your pennies because the quiet ones were coming.
Through all of that, one thing became clear: I had found a community that wanted Hostel Tevere to succeed.
People in the Mad River Valley welcomed me, supported the business and made a guy with no lodging or restaurant experience feel like maybe this crazy idea could actually work.
I didn’t know much about running a hostel. Fortunately, the hostel had a lot to teach me.
You Go to Bed as Strangers
One of the biggest surprises about owning a hostel has been watching how naturally people from completely different backgrounds get along.
I’ve always said that at Hostel Tevere, you can go to bed as strangers and wake up as friends.
And I’ve seen it happen over and over.
We’ve welcomed families traveling with teenagers and guests well into their 70s — with our oldest guest, that I know of, staying with us at 80. We’ve had travelers carefully watching every dollar and others who could have stayed just about anywhere.
They’ve arrived on foot from the trail, on bicycles loaded with camping gear, by train followed by the challenge of finding a ride into the Valley — and, in at least one case, in a McLaren.
Their lives are just as different.
One of my favorite guests was a retired nuclear submarine captain. We’ve hosted people from professions and backgrounds I never would have encountered in my everyday life.
Yet once everyone is sitting around the same bar, sharing a table or talking about the day’s adventures, most of those differences don’t matter very much.
That’s what a hostel can do that a hotel usually can’t.
And then there are the people who come back.
Every winter, familiar faces begin walking through the door. Skiers who discovered Tevere years ago return season after season, sometimes several times in the same year.
Somewhere along the way, they stop feeling quite so much like guests.
They start feeling like friends.
Different ages. Different jobs. Different budgets. Different ways of getting here. One table at the end of the day.
When Everything Stopped
Eleven months after I bought Hostel Tevere, everything stopped.
When COVID arrived in March 2020, no one really knew what was going to happen. I made the decision to refund every hostel reservation for the next two months, closed our booking system and shut down the hostel.
We tried restaurant takeout for about two weeks, but it quickly became clear it wasn’t going to work.
I laid off the entire staff and closed the building.
For the first time since buying Tevere, the place was completely quiet.
There were constantly changing rules and a lot of uncertainty about what reopening would eventually look like. During that time, the Mad River Valley Chamber brought local lodging owners together to share information, work through the rules and figure out how we could safely welcome guests back to the Valley.
That lodging group still meets today.
Learning Another Job
My mom and I worked in the kitchen.
By late May, I decided it was time to try again.
We reopened the restaurant for takeout. Then, in June, my chef gave me two weeks’ notice.
Suddenly, the guy who had bought a restaurant with no restaurant experience was about to become its head chef.
I called my parents and told them what had happened. Without skipping a beat, they came to Vermont to help.
For the next six months, everyone found themselves doing jobs none of us had imagined. My mom and I worked in the kitchen. My friend Justin became the bartender. My dad became a server.
None of us had planned on this.
There wasn’t a playbook for running a hostel and restaurant through a pandemic, so we figured it out one day at a time. It was chaotic, exhausting and, strangely enough, sometimes exciting.
Mostly, I remember hoping it would work.
We had already made it through the uncertainty of my first year. Now another wrench had been thrown into the plan, and all we could really do was keep adapting and keep going.
And somehow, we did.
Eleven months after buying a hostel, I had closed it, laid off the staff and somehow become the head chef.
Finding Our Way Forward
Eventually, the doors opened again.
Guests started traveling, people became comfortable sharing spaces with strangers again, and slowly the hostel began to feel like a hostel.
After everything we had been through, we also realized something needed to change.
In July 2022, we gave the restaurant its own name: Déco Restaurant & Bar.
For years, people had simply known the entire place as “the hostel.” Even locals and second homeowners who had been coming here for years didn’t always realize there was a full restaurant and bar inside.
Giving the restaurant its own identity was our way of making it clear that there were two parts of the same place: a hostel welcoming travelers to the Valley and a neighborhood restaurant welcoming everyone through the door.
The hostel changed a little too. We removed three beds, bringing our maximum sleeping capacity to 24 and giving guests a little more room while keeping the shared experience that has always been part of Tevere.
It took time for travel to really feel normal again. But gradually the bunks filled, familiar faces returned, and strangers started sitting around the same tables again.
And that’s when the place really came back to life.
The Best Part Hasn’t Changed
There is something special about walking through the hostel when it’s full.
You hear stories and laughter. Sometimes there’s crying. People trade travel tips, compare ski days, talk about where they’ve been and where they’re going next.
Travelers who might never have met anywhere else find themselves sharing a room, a drink, a meal or a story.
That’s still my favorite part of this place.
There are plenty of challenges ahead. One of the biggest is making Hostel Tevere more of a year-round business, so the distance between the busy seasons and the quiet ones isn’t quite so great.
We’re not there yet.
But each day, I feel like we’re getting a little closer.
For now, we keep welcoming people through the door, sharing stories and taking it one day at a time.
For now, we keep welcoming people through the door, sharing stories and taking it one day at a time.
We’re All Just Stewards of This Place
When I bought Hostel Tevere in 2019, I didn’t create this place.
Giles and Sarah had already built something special here. They took an old Vermont farmhouse and created a place where travelers could afford to stay, people could meet one another, and locals and visitors could share the same space.
I just became the next person responsible for it.
Over the years, I’ve come to think of myself less as the owner of Hostel Tevere and more as its steward.
This farmhouse was here long before any of us. Hostel Tevere has already had different owners, different employees and thousands of people pass through its doors. Someday, someone else will be responsible for whatever comes next.
Our job while we’re here is to take care of it.
To keep it affordable. To keep it welcoming. To protect the community that has grown around it. And to make sure the next person has something worth carrying forward.
Because in the end, Hostel Tevere isn’t really about who owns the building.
It’s about the people who bring it to life.
Every guest who has slept in a bunk. Every employee who has worked a shift. Every local who has sat at the bar. Every person who has helped when things got difficult. And every traveler who arrived as a stranger and left with a story.
We’re all part of it.
We’re all just stewards of this place.
“I didn’t create Hostel Tevere. I inherited something that was already special. My job is to take care of it, keep it welcoming and leave it better for whoever comes next.”
The Story Isn’t Finished
More than fifteen years after Giles and Sarah first opened the doors, Hostel Tevere is still evolving.
There are things we want to improve, challenges still to figure out and plenty of ideas for what this place could become. But whatever changes, I hope the heart of Tevere stays the same.
An affordable place to stay. A welcoming place to gather. And a place where people who arrive as strangers can leave as friends.
I don’t know what the next chapter of Hostel Tevere will look like.
That’s part of what makes this place interesting.
The story of Tevere has never belonged to just one person. It belongs to everyone who has been part of it — and everyone who hasn’t arrived yet.
Maybe the next story starts with you.
SINCE 1839
The people change. The stories change. The old farmhouse remains.
HOSTEL TEVERE · WARREN, VERMONT