A nearly two-hundred-year-old in-town plantation house under Live Oak and Spanish moss on Craven Street, the most cinematic veranda in Beaufort and the most reliable Southern breakfast in the Carolinas.
"The Rhett House is the inn the film crews keep coming back to, and once you see the veranda you understand why. Pay for the Southern breakfast on the porch, sit out the heat with a book, repeat for three days. There is no other agenda."
The Rhett House Inn was built around 1820 as the in-town plantation house of cotton planter Thomas Moore Rhett and his wife Caroline Barnwell. The building survives essentially intact, a Greek Revival main house with double verandas, four working fireplaces, twelve-foot ceilings, and a corner lot on Craven Street that sits under a canopy of Live Oaks so heavy with Spanish moss it reads as theatre to a first-time arrival. The Rhett House has been operating as an inn since the late 1980s, and the current ownership has spent the last decade quietly bringing the rooms forward without disturbing what the front porch already does for free.
The 19 keys split between the main house and a row of restored cottages on the grounds. The main house rooms are the period-correct option: four-poster beds, fireplaces, oversized clawfoot tubs, and balconies that open onto the upper veranda. The cottages are larger, more contemporary, and the right move for a long weekend; several include a small private yard and a garden tub. Categories run from queen rooms to the corner Master Suite with a separate sitting room. The inn is consistently used as a film location for productions shooting in and around Beaufort, and the rooms have hosted enough on-location crews to keep the level of finish high.
Breakfast is the Rhett House's signature meal. The kitchen, led by Chef Beverly, plates a proper Southern breakfast on the historic veranda or in the intimate dining room each morning: shrimp and grits, country ham, biscuit service, a daily egg preparation, and a coffee program that runs from six. Afternoon tea, an evening social hour, and house-baked sweets on arrival round out the food offer. The inn does not run a dinner restaurant, and that is the right decision; Beaufort's better tables are five minutes on foot and the inn has been recommending the same five for thirty years.
Service is the Rhett House's other quiet superpower. The front desk holds three decades of Lowcountry institutional memory, and the staff-to-room ratio sits high enough that names are remembered by the second morning. Bicycles are provided, kayaks can be arranged, and the inn maintains a small concierge file for off-the-shelf island and plantation day-trips, including the Penn Center on St. Helena and the Hunting Island lighthouse half an hour east. The Rhett House remains the most consistently booked anniversary address in Beaufort and the inn most likely to make a first-time visitor extend their stay by a day.
For a Southern anniversary, the Rhett House is the cleanest booking south of Charleston. Take a main-house room with a working fireplace, accept the upper veranda breakfast tray, and let the property do its job. The 1820 bones, the Live Oak shade, and Chef Beverly's biscuits are the whole pitch.
A honeymoon at the Rhett House works best in one of the cottage residences: more space, a private yard, and the option of breakfast delivered rather than served on the public veranda. The inn will quietly stage in-room flowers and a champagne course on request, and the front desk can hold a corner table at a sister restaurant downtown.
The Rhett House is the Lowcountry's strongest solo booking. Ask for one of the smaller main-house queens, take breakfast on the porch alone, read through the heat of the afternoon, and walk the seawall after sunset. The inn's social hour is the only forced public moment and it lasts forty-five minutes.
1009 Craven Street
Beaufort, SC 29902
United States
Two blocks from the Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park; corner lot under Live Oaks
19 rooms across main house and cottages
Queen rooms from $174/night
King fireplace rooms from $239/night
Cottage residences from $350/night
Master Suite to $450/night
Check-in: 3:00 PM
Check-out: 11:00 AM
Main house circa 1820; operating as inn since 1987
Full hot Southern breakfast included
Afternoon tea and evening social hour
Working fireplaces in main-house rooms
Double verandas under Live Oaks
Complimentary bicycles
Complimentary WiFi throughout
From $174/night. Fireplace rooms and the cottages book three to four months ahead for Beaufort Film Festival in February and Water Festival in July; main-house King rooms book the fastest.
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