Three years after a dramatic fire destroyed a building at the Bluenose Inn in Bar Harbor, the owner has rebuilt it with a new design and plans to open it for guests this summer.
The new $9 million Eden Building at the Bluenose Inn was constructed with roughly half as many units as its predecessor had, but each unit is bigger than the rooms in the previous building, according to the hotel’s website. Each of the new 21 single-bedroom suites is equipped with a king-sized bedroom, a full kitchen and a living room with a queen-sized pull-out sofa bed. Each unit also has two balconies — one off the living area and another off the bedroom.
The old building had contained 45 traditional hotel-style guest rooms when it caught fire in February 2022. The inn was closed for the winter at the time, and a sprinkler system designed to douse fires in the building had been turned off, public safety officials said at the time.
The cause of the blaze was an electrical issue, officials said in 2022. The flames spread through the empty building, causing part of it to collapse. The hotel’s separate main building, which looms over Route 3 across from the College of the Atlantic campus, was unharmed in the fire.
It was the second major fire at the Bluenose Inn in recent decades. The main building, which was built on the foundation of a 19th-century summer estate owned by mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, burned down in March 1994 in a fire caused by a propane heater in its basement, officials said at the time. That building also was later rebuilt.
The inn is owned by Lafayette Hotels, which owns more than 30 hotels in Maine and New Hampshire, including the neighboring Wonderview Inn in Bar Harbor. The company is planning a grand opening of the new 8,500-square-foot building early next month.