Since 2015 the New River Gorge Creative Residency has afforded writers and artists the unique opportunity to live and work at Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals in Fayetteville, WV. In years past, a singular resident has been chosen but this winter, THREE creatives have been awarded the residency. By tripling the number of residency recipients, […]

It’s a special treat to give your friends and family presents from the Mountain State. Knowing that every gift you purchase supports a West Virginia artist, maker, or small business adds a whole nother layer of goodwill. But social distancing and Christmas shopping don’t work together, so we’ve curated 39 unique gifts that are available […]

The art-filled environment inside Lafayette Flats fosters creativity and inspires visionary thinking. Our guests have affectionately compared it to sleeping in an art museum. This comparison makes us very happy. And we know it makes our art benefactors, Mark Tobin Moore and Donna Whitten, happy too! When the director of Moment Makers, a series of […]

  SPECIAL UPDATE – Legislation passed by Congress on 12/21/20 has designated the New River Gorge the 63rd national park in the United States! It is now known as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.  The New and Gauley Rivers offer some of the best whitewater rafting experiences in the United States, if […]

“Where I grew up, the only time you heard the word art was when you were talking about someone named Arthur,” Charley Harper told designer, Todd Oldham, in the short documentary, At Home with Charley Harper. Charley Harper, a beloved mid-century modernist artist, was born and raised in Frenchton, West Virginia. Yes, West Virginia. Frenchton […]

There’s something so charming about Fayetteville, West Virginia, the small town that sits on the rim of the New River Gorge. Sure, the forest that surrounds Fayetteville is enchanting (so enchanting that the National Park Service purchased 70,000 acres in the 1980s to create a National River), but the small town itself has a lot […]

We spend a lot of time in the New River Gorge hunting for mushrooms. When we’re not hunting mushrooms we’re usually talking about hunting mushrooms, which often prompts people to ask us why we enjoy it so much. Sometimes, we fear, they soon regret asking because we can go on and on about the many, […]

Limited Edition Print Promoting art and artists from our home state is not only our passion, it’s in our business plan. Each year we dedicate a portion of our vacation rental income to the purchase of West Virginia art to add to our collection at Lafayette Flats. For this year’s art purchase, we decided to […]

We purchased the building that now houses Lafayette Flats in June of 2014 and worked on its renovation for the rest of the summer, fall and through the winter. By the time we opened to guests in April of 2015, we had learned a lot about the rhythms of the seasons in Fayetteville. Mostly we […]

Each year we dedicate a portion of our vacation rental income to a fund from which we purchase new West Virginia art. Promoting art and artists from our home state is actually in our business plan for Lafayette Flats. You can read more about it here.   For our 2018 Art Fund purchase, we traveled […]