Charleston SC Downtown Hotels

Experience true southern hospitality at our intimate small inn located in the historic French Quarter in Charleston, South Carolina. You’ll be just steps from Charleston’s waterfront, historic southern mansions, parks, unique Southern dining, shopping and art galleries. Our luxury Charleston South Carolina hotel has been recognized by distinguished media outlets such as Travel & Leisure, the New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler.

For more than three hundred years, Charleston SC has been known as a cosmopolitan city, famous for her southern hospitality, diverse cultural history, architectural beauty, and the vital commerical interests she serves as a major seaport city.

In the Historic District, stately homes and mansions, steepled churches and many commercial buildings have been lovingly restored over the years.  The majority of these structures were originally built in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Stroll through areas where America's earliest statemen lived.  Charleston was the home of signers of the Declaration of Independence - you can sit in their church pews and visit their final resting place in the historic churchyard of St. Michael's Episcopal Church at the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets.

While meandering through the streets of the Historic District, you will notice plaques on various walls and homes which detail the history of many original structures, homes to generations of Charlestonians.

Visit quiet White Point Gardens at the end of East Bay Street, known locally as The Battery.  Its cannons, used by Confederate forces during the The Civi War are still trained on historic Fort Sumter which stands guard in the harbor even today.

Charleston has survived wars and the resulting economic hardships, natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and yet she remains a thriving, growing, and prosperous Southern city welcoming visitors from all over the world.  Charleston SC is truly one of America's most unique cities.

A Brief History of the French Quarter and the Vendue Inn

Charleston's French Quarter is an amorphous area which extends in all directions from the intersection of Vendue Range, Queen Street and East Bay Street.  Historic records show that a clustering of French Protestants and French Catholics settled here during the 18th and 19th century.

Vendue Range takes its name from the vendue masters or auctioneers, who had their establishments here.  The street is on "made land" which was in-filled during the 18th century. A brick market was built here following the Revolution in the middle of what is now Vendue Range.

Loss of religious freedom in France in 1685 sent waves of French Protestants Huguenots as refugees to the American colonies including South Carolina.  Descendants of those Huguenot immigrants included Theodore Gaillard, Samuel Porcher and Samuel Cordes. Notable rows of 18th and 19th century commerical buildings on Vendue Range were built by merchants and vendue masters of French descents.   Samuel Prioleau (of French and Italian Protestant descent), owned a complex of wharfs, stores, and warehouses in the late 17th and 18th century in the Vendue Range section.  His name and those of family connections are memorialized in the Prioleau, Gendron and Cordes Street.

Most of the buildings in the French Quarter were listed in the National Register of Historic Places prior to 1973 when a collection of mostly 19th century warehouses were saved from demolition by the "Save Charleston Foundation", a group of local citizens who conducted a national campaign to raise money for that specific purpose.  The irreplaceable warehouses on Queen Street, State Street and Lodge Alley were then conveyed to developers who rehabilitated the properties into valuable commerical businesses.

 

Charleston's Vendue Inn was created from French Quarter warehouses located on the sites below.  These warehouses were used to house a variety of goods sold by French merchants and traders.

15-17 Vendue Range

Thomas Napier, a Scottish merchant, constructed two adjoining three story brick buildings around 1830 on this site.  The property remained in Napier's estate throughout the Civil War and suffered in  the bombardment of the city.  The two buildings were rebuilt as one around 1870 by Fredrick W. Wagener, a wholesale grocery merchant and cotton factor.

23-25 Vendue Range

Originally two adjoining brick tenement buildings built in the 1790 by Samuel Prioleaus, Jr., the property was damaged by the Federal bombardment of the city during the Civil War and rebuilt as a single building after the war by Anthony J. Salinas, a cotton factor.

162-166 East Bay Street

Samuel Prioleau, Jr. built a brick double tenement of three stories of brick sometime after 1783.  In 1839, the property was remodeled and the two buildings were converted into one with the addition of a new storefront consisting of a Quincy granite post and lintel system, extending along the East Bay and Vendue Range facades.  The brick structure was destroyed by fire in 1867, and in 1872 it was rebuilt from Mrs. Ann Ross as a two story, stuccoed brick building, retaining the 1839 granite post and lintel system on the first level. 

Unique Features of Our Charleston Inn. Because we’re a small boutique hotel, we can offer special touches not found in larger Charleston SC hotels. You’ll find wrought iron beds, exposed brick walls, Egyptian cotton sheets, bikes available for waterfront cruising,a full southern breakfast, a afternoon manager’s reception, evening cookies and milk and a fine dining restaurant plus a rooftop bar that overlooks Charleston Harbor.