Sleepless Gay Romance in Seattle

There’s something about Seattle that keeps the city on nearly everyone’s bucket list. Everywhere you go, you meet gay people whose eyes kind of glaze over when they talk about Seattle.

Seattle is one of those places that makes people want to start anew and fall in love with life again. All that green and blue, the forests and the water, Puget Sound and Elliott Bay and Lake Washington and the San Juan Islands – it’s balm for the soul.

Even if you’ve never been to Seattle, you’ve seen the photos of the seven-hill city ringed by snow-capped mountains and the waterways heading into mystical realms. Seattle makes people dream of another life: the one where they’re in touch with nature and, thus, themselves.

Incorporated in 1869, Seattle was named for the chief of the Native Americans who lived in the region 4,000 years before the arrival of white settlers. Home to one of the world’s first sedentary hunter-gatherer societies, Seattle has always been one of those places that is easy to love and hard to leave.

Today, Seattle is second only to San Francisco in American cities with the highest percentage of LGBT residents. For your own romance with Seattle, you might check into Hotel 1000, the 120-room downtown boutique hotel that is located on one of the city’s most vertiginous blocks: the top of the block is six stories above the pavement at the bottom, which makes for stunning views throughout the building.

Opened in 2006, Hotel 1000 is a part of the city’s first residential-hotel complex and the rooms are the equivalent of pied à terre apartments. The hotel’s attention to detail makes you feel that you’re residing in a full-service residential building: a glass of Champagne upon arrival, a car and driver for your needs within a two-mile radius, your shoes polished and shined, and same-day dry-cleaning services.

Hotel 1000 also offers rose petal turndown service, with bubbly and long-stem roses, as well as housemade chocolate truffles. A member of the Preferred Pride Hotel Group, Hotel 1000 is listed in both Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler “Gold List” as one of the best hotels of 2012.

Studio 1000, the lobby lounge, serves complimentary coffee and Mighty-O Donuts, which are lethally delicious and which will fortify you for your peregrinations around the city.

The center of Seattle’s LGBT life is Capitol Hill, which is located east of downtown and up a steep hill, about a 1.5-mile walk – but the rewards are worth the exercise. Punctuated with trendy restaurants, stately homes, and lushly forested parks, Capitol Hill feels like an idyllic bohemian American village where musicians, stroller moms, and artists celebrate the good life with the city’s hipster LGBT population.

At sunset, if you take a stroll through Volunteer Park and climb the 106 steps to the top of Capitol Hill’s water tower (relax, it’s good for the glutes – and besides, it’s free), you’re rewarded with a panoramic vista of some of Seattle’s most recognizable landmarks.

Hotel 1000‘s in-house restaurant, BOKA restaurant + bar, is helmed by Chef Peter Birk whose innovative cuisine is a reflection of the Northwest’s indigenous bounty, complemented by Birk’s own Southern heritage. New Caledonian blue prawns, for example, are served with creamy grits and hominy, thereby creating a Seattle equivalent to that Southern staple “shrimp-n-grits.”

After dinner, you might consider shaking your moneymaker at Q nightclub in Capitol Hill. Designed by the same architectural firm that created Apple’s signature cube on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Q has reinvigorated Seattle’s LGBT nightlife. With a renewed focus on music, sound, and lighting and the motto “Music is our message,” Q has become the bellwether of 21st-century nightclubbing.

On Sunday, call in on SAM, which is an acronym for Seattle Art Museum, the city’s foremost art museum. The museum’s recent acclaimed exhibition “Future Beauty” was an illuminating 30-year retrospective of the impact of Japanese fashion designers on popular culture.

With more than 10 million annual visitors, Pike Place Market is, arguably, Seattle‘s definitive tourist destination. Open since 1907, Pike Place Market is a nine-acre historic district that is home to more than 200 businesses, including a farmers market, bakeries, butchers, and fishmongers, all buzzing with caffeine energy, which is to be expected at the home of the original Starbucks, which opened in the market in 1971.

In spite of what you might think you know about Seattle‘s weather, the city actually receives less rainfall than New York – and especially if you visit Seattle between the months of May and September.

In clement weather, take a leisurely stroll along Seattle‘s historic waterfront to Olympic Sculpture Park, which is one of SAM‘s two other facilities around the city. The nine-acre sculpture park features magnificent pieces by such illustrious sculptors as Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, and Louise Nevelson. With sunset vistas across Elliott Bay, Olympic Sculpture Park is the sort of picturesque locale that Hollywood employs for marriage proposals in a Seattle rom-com.

Given that same-sex marriage has been legal in the state of Washington since December 6, 2012, why not get hitched in Seattle? Live your own Hollywood rom-com and pop the question atop the newly-opened Seattle Great Wheel. Located along the Alaskan Way on Pier 57, Seattle’s historic 1896 Gold Rush pier, the Seattle Great Wheel is illuminated in the evenings with enough psychedelic LED lights to resurrect Seattle native son, Jimi Hendrix.

If you still recall with fondness the scene in E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” when Fern and Henry Fussy ride the Ferris wheel and stop at the top, then the Seattle Great Wheel has your name on it – and especially if you reserve the luxury gondola outfitted with leather bucket seats and a glass floor.

For additional romance, check into The Fairmont Olympic Hotel, the undisputed “Grande Dame” of Seattle hotels. Built in 1924 (on the original site of the University of Washington), The Olympic is located in the heart of downtown Seattle in a splendid Italianate Renaissance structure that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

To enter into The Olympic‘s sumptuous wood-paneled lobby with its gilded columns and golden chandeliers is to recognize the extraordinary wealth that followed the Klondike Gold Rush. As a gateway to Alaska, Seattle served a purpose similar to San Francisco: clothing and feeding the miners, which, for one Seattle visionary, resulted in Nordstrom’s.

Today, The Olympic is home to Seattle‘s oldest oyster bar and The Georgian, one of the city’s most romantic dining rooms.

Still looking for just the right locale for something celebratory? Consider this: a mere thirty minutes northeast of downtown Seattle, there exists an oenophile’s paradise. Located in the bucolic Sammamish River Valley, Woodinville is a rural wooded community notable for more than 90 tasting rooms for Washington vintners.

While you won’t encounter any grape vines in Woodinville, you will, nonetheless, taste the bounty from numerous Columbia Valley vineyards located just over the Cascade Mountain range in Eastern Washington.

Woodinville took off as a wine destination in the 1970s, when Chateau Ste. Michelle’s palatial estate opened to the public. Since then, nearly one hundred second-location wineries and tasting rooms have welcomed the public.

Most of the tasting rooms are located within a five-mile radius and easily accessible by foot from “downtown” Woodinville. Willows Lodge, another member of the Preferred Pride Hotel Group, is the de facto clubhouse for many wine tourists, offering a series of wine-related events throughout the year, as well as the region’s two most celebrated restaurants, The Herbfarm and Barking Frog.

A sense of calm and well-being is pervasive throughout Willows Lodge, which feels like it’s located in a land notable for serenity. With its two-sided stone fireplace and a timber-lined lobby, Willows Lodge evokes the luxuriant rustic style associated with the heyday of the Adirondacks “Great Camps.” To heighten the romance, rooms at Willows Lodge are equipped with gas-powered fireplaces: one flick of the switch and you’ve created atmosphere. Willows Lodge‘s five-acre grounds include landscaped gardens with gazebo, an outdoor Jacuzzi, an Asian zen garden, an in-house spa, as well as Barking Frog.

Dinner at Barking Frog is a joyful union of regional bounty and inspired cuisine, thanks to the charismatic and personable chef Bobby Moore, who honors the Northwest with innovative pairings.

According to Native Americans of the Northwest, a barking frog is a sign of peace and harmony with nature, which is something that almost inevitably occurs while in residence at Willows Lodge.

Settle in front of the fireplace and toast to the restorative romance that comes from a blissfully gay weekend in Seattle.