There is an old adage that says you can never go home again. But for Phil Baxter, who founded Baxter Hospitality with his wife Silvia, that is not the case. He has gone back to his hospitality roots in Cape Cod, MA—and fulfilled both of their dreams—by owning a portfolio of hotels.
“I started here on the Cape in family-owned properties,” said Phil Baxter. “My family had three properties, so it was all-hands-on-deck and everything for the summer. It was a very traditional, family-focused business.”
Growing up in the hotels led to full-time career in the industry for Baxter, mostly on the West Coast. “The majority of my career, I spent with Tishman Realty and Construction doing everything from regional operations oversight to asset management to investment banking,” he said. “My last job was the GM of the Westin Los Angeles Airport for Marriott.”
While Silvia Baxter did not grow up in the industry like her husband, she has an extensive background in hotels, starting her career in 1985 in Los Angeles. The two met at the Four Points LAX, where she was director of revenue management, and he held a regional VP general manager role.
After their extensive careers on the West Coast, they were looking for the next phase in their lives. “We were looking for a phase-two opportunity, at least from our standpoint to put our skills to use as principals as opposed to putting our skills to the benefit of others,” said Phil Baxter. “We felt that we had pretty good complementary skill sets, and worked well together and had practice working together. We were looking for the Phase 2, but not retirement. We would be bad at retirement if this was retirement. It is an opportunity for us to have fun, finishing our career having a good time at work.”
They began searching for that opportunity, and the fact that their youngest daughter was attending school in New Hampshire narrowed their search. “We always knew that we wanted to do something like we were doing right now, but we didn’t know how and where,” said Silvia Baxter. “…She was 14 years old when I brought her to the school. I was always worried about her, so I wanted a way to be close to her, so I started checking the area, the East Coast, to see what a good destination would be. That is how I came across Cape Cod.”
It didn’t hurt that Phil Baxter grew up in the area and knew it well. “We felt that Cape Cod was a good choice for us because we had the familiarity and from a destination standpoint, it is [near] multiple metro areas, so not just Boston,” he said. “We felt really comfortable with the Cape Cod as a demand generator.”
He wanted to have a property that—just like the ones his family owned when he was a kid—was family friendly. “This property gave us the opportunity to create this family-friendly environment, which was nostalgic for me,” he said. “When we looked, we looked at the bed and breakfast and we just didn’t feel that we wanted to be in that kind of business where people have to tiptoe around and worry about which towel they are going to use and things like that. We wanted the kids running around and the pool and the sustainability. We added goats and bees. Very authentic Cape Cod is what we were looking for.”
That first property was Sesuit Harbor House, which has a main house that was built in 1735. “It was a typical shipbuilder’s house on the Cape built by a man named Hall,” he said.
They took over the property last spring—10 days before it closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the summer season approached, they reopened and welcomed guests. “We had the benefit of a loyal guest base,” he said. “People had been coming to this property and that was good. We just hit the ground running. Our expectation was to survive the season, but we actually survived and thrived. It went well.”
Their experience helped them thrive. “The COVID season favored the pros because we were able to draw from our best practices over the years and create a modified service for COVID and distancing and it went very well,” said Phil Baxter. “We were really able to move up the Tripadvisor rankings. I think we got as high as 3 out of 220 on Cape Cod and maybe finishing at 4.”
That first season went so well that they decided to purchase another historic property six miles down the road, Chapter House, which is scheduled to open for this summer season. Again, Silvia found it. “I always go by that building and I love it,” she said. “When I found out it was on sale, it really caught my attention.”
This one is a fixer-upper. “We looked at target properties as ones that we would be able to add value,” said Phil Baxter. “We wanted distressed pricing, so we wanted to get in at a good basis. We wanted properties with people passionate about that authentic hospitality piece. The Chapter House is a really magical property from a lot of different standpoints. It is literally the cover of all of the ghost story books on Cape Cod. You walk through it and you fall in love with it right away.”
The first building of The Chapter House was built in 1716, with expansions in 1780 and sometime in the 1800s. “We subsequently learned from the Town of Yarmouth that it is one of the most important buildings in the town,” he said. “We are learning firsthand what keeps the integrity of the development of the Cape in line, and it is their towns’ historical committees that are extremely detailed in their oversight. They are really nice people, and it has been a pleasure dealing with them, but it does force you to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.”
The property has a good-sized commercial kitchen and the second phase of renovation is to find a partner to operate a restaurant onsite.
During the renovations, Phil Baxter said he found what he called a bonus that will open in the future. “There is a swimming pool in the basement,” he said. “It is surrounded on three sides by this amazing granite foundation. It had been filled in and pavers had been put on top of the fill.”
The Baxters’ vision for the property is that it will be ideal for work and stay. “I’ve got a fiber line coming in,” he said. “We’ve got brand-new internet-connected televisions coming in. It is going to be teched out, but it will be behind the scenes. It will have amazing WiFi and you will be able to watch Netflix and Hulu easily on the TVs.”
The Chapter House and its location close to their first property was an ideal situation for the Baxters. “In thinking it through, we wanted to have a few properties from an economy of scale standpoint,” said Phil Baxter. “The challenge we wanted to solve in terms of scaling our little business was HR. We felt that keeping the properties clustered was going to be a good bet for us. Even though we had two experienced managers coming on board to help us this season, we wanted to be able to go back and forth between the properties and keep them close rather than having a second property in New Hampshire and then a property down here. We wanted to create a cluster on Cape. This is the start of that cluster.”