Laurium Manor Inn

Like so much of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, the Laurium Manor Inn presents a surprising taste of the upscale and cosmopolitan in a lightly populated region known for outdoor adventures. The Laurium, a stunning, 13,000-square-foot Victorian mansion with 10 guest rooms, provides a B&B experience as excellent as any we've seen in the Midwest. The inn stands in a residential neighborhood in tiny Laurium, a town connected to Calumet, which was a leading city of the Upper Midwest during the 1800s copper boom. Now the copper baron's mansion is an inn operated by a couple of engineers who moved back to the Keweenaw thanks to their dual passion for the area's lifestyle and the enormous old houses they could rehab here. The home (uninhabitable when the owners bought it) is beautifully restored with ornate woodwork, paintings on canvas ceilings, stained-glass windows and a wedding-worthy central staircase. Each room has a bathroom, flat-panel TV and other touches you should expect in any good lodging but that are so often absent from lesser B&Bs. Julie the co-owner makes guests' breakfasts in the original kitchen (still using the original wall-size icebox for storage) and serves it in the ornate original dining room. Guests enjoy a couple of different sitting rooms, including a library-smoking room straight out of a game of Clue, and a sweeping front porch. The Victorian Hall across the street offers another eight guest rooms, but Victorian Hall guests come over to the Laurium's dining room for breakfast.