A Unique Bed & Breakfast In the Heart of San Antonio's Historic District

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The Sun Room

Bright. Airy. Open. Expansive. The Sun Room suite is very aptly named. The suite is located on the second floor of the house, and we designed it to be the kind of suite that a guest could stay in for many days or weeks at a time, yet never feel cramped. The suite has unique features that are not duplicated anywhere else in the house, and only rarely equaled at any other B&B. The Sun Room suite was, quite simply, a superlative accommodation.

The Sun Room Suite

On entering the Sun Room, you find yourself in the bedroom proper. In front of you are the king-size iron bed and a chest in the Spanish Colonial style. The other decorative elements in the bedroom all harken back to the decorative heritage of Old Mexico. By itself, the bedroom is a spacious room, but is only part of the suite.

Just off the bedroom area is the bath, which is done in dark blue tile and features a shower with showerhead, handheld shower and three body jets- all of which combine into an invigorating experience.

The separate vanity area is outside the bath, which is convenient when two people are occupying the room. The vanity has a beautiful and extremely colorful ceramic tile bowl of a type and of a decoration usually only found in the best homes in Mexico.

Views of the Sun Room Suite: Sitting Area and Accents

The bedroom area is only a third of the suite. Through an archway is the sun room itself. It is a bright comfortable room, surrounded with windows on three sides, and contains ample seating for reading and relaxing. When one is in the sun room, the sounds of the East Garden waterfall come in through the windows that look out over the entire garden down below.

We wanted to emphasize the Spanish and Mexican connections, so all the decorative touches in the Sun Room Suite evoke that "south of the border" feel; these decorative touches and accents throughout the room always reminded the visitor of the best of Old Mexico and taken together gave the room its distinctive ambience.

The Spiral Stairway and Sun Room Accents

But we decided to do even more with this particular suite. The sitting room (sun room) portion of the suite was situated over the east patio and had a relatively flat roof above it, so we decided to give this room another distinctive and quite unusual feature. In one corner of the room there is a wrought-iron circular stairway; ascending the stairway brings you up into the inside a four-sided cupola, perched on the roof of the house, directly above the sitting room and reachable only from it.

The Rooftop Cupola

When you open the cupola's door, you'll find yourself on a completely private rooftop deck.

The Rooftop Deck and Spiral Stairway

This deck is an area invisible from the rest of the rooms in the house; here there are chaise lounges and a table, allowing the visitor to sunbathe, read, or simply appreciate the morning or afternoon with coffee, tea or a glass of wine.

This private rooftop deck often surprised our guests; many of them took one look at the inside of the suite and booked it right away. But it was one of the features that made the Sun Room by far our most popular room. So popular, in fact, that it is one of the two rooms that were finalists for our own master bedroom. And, as you may have read already, we finally decided to combine both those rooms together, resulting in a sleeping and relaxing space that will actually be larger than the garage apartment we are moving from. (The other room we are utilizing is the English Room, and the wall between them is being removed.)