HighWinds Lodge and Cottages follows, in a much humbler way, the storied tradition of the Lake Dunmore House of the mid-nineteenth century, one of Vermont’s most renowned destination resorts of the era. The original site is only a stone’s-throw away. The grand hotels are gone, but the magic remains. Sleepy Oaks Resort was constructed in the 1920s and provides the footprint for HighWinds.* About a mile across the lake from HighWinds, Branbury State Park was opened in 1959, offering public access to picnic grounds and an ample sandy beach. Campsites, vacation homes, and cottages discretely surround the three-mile-long lake, and it remains somewhat more serene then many of the region’s lakes.
* James and Max Petersen. Lord Dunmore’s Lake. (Dunmore House Publishing, Salisbury, VT, 1998), 39, 86.
In both Danish and Norwegian, hygge refers to a form of everyday togetherness, a pleasant and highly valued experience of safety, equality, personal wholeness and a spontaneous social flow"