Memphis Staycation Destinations

The word “staycation” — a change of scenery without the misery of travel — has only recently entered our vocabularies. So in this, our second annual “Staycation” issue, we came up with the notion of building a fascinating week of non-travel by simply wandering through the local Airbnb listings, exploring just what kind of staycation opportunities exist right here in Memphis.

The range of overnight selections, we quickly discovered, is staggering. Founded just 10 years ago, Airbnb is now a $2.6 billion company, with over four million listings in 65,000 cities in 191 countries. Nearly 400 of those listings are right here in Memphis, making Airbnb a major player in the hospitality landscape. With the introduction of the Room Occupancy Tax and Tourism Improvement District Assessment last June, Airbnb generated $300,000 in tax revenue for our city in the second half of last year, with guest arrivals up almost 80 percent over the same period in 2016.

Not surprisingly, local prices are all over the map, ranging from as little as $50 a night for a shared space in a local home to just under $1,000 for the sprawling former home of Dr. George Nichopoulos, Elvis’ personal physician. And while there are eccentricities such as the “clothing optional” property near Wolfchase or a tent behind the downtown post office, the majority of Airbnb options are mainstream places designed to make visitors more than just comfortable; they’re deliberately intended to be your home away from home. 

So we conducted a modest experiment: What would a week of staycation be like if you picked your overnight destinations from local Airbnb listings?  

Our criteria were few. We picked at least one place from each of Airbnb’s three basic categories: a shared home listing (these account for 42 percent of Memphis listings); a separate apartment (guest houses, garage apartments, and such); and, of course, an entire house you could have to yourself. Our fictitious staycationers were a couple, and we chose one property each for a modest budget, a mid-range budget, and a weekend splurge.

If you’re not already an Airbnb user, getting to know the company’s app (airbnb.com) is time well-spent. We prefer the laptop approach, so we can see big photos of each listing. “Read. The. Entire. Description,” says Patrick McCabe, an Airbnb “Superhost” in Central Gardens. Superhost is an Airbnb designation that indicates frequent tenancy and superior reviews. As McCabe suggests, finding the place you really want can be a heck of a reading assignment. Hosts make rules about everything from washing-machine use to smoking to controlling television hours. And prepare yourself for a mild case of sticker shock, not unlike what happens when you make a hotel booking. That room that looks like it’s just $80 a night will actually ring up for $130 once Airbnb adds a cleaning fee, service fee, and city occupancy tax. Prices for each accommodation will vary, and you can expect them to go up during festivals, holidays and other peak times.

Knowing how to use the filters on the Airbnb home page is essential. Here you can identify the type of situation you want, the amenities you require (pool? Wifi? gated?), and what you want to pay. Feel free to message the host to ask a specific question (“Is this kitchen peanut-free?”) before you book. When you do enter your dates and click on “request to book,” you will see the total cost. It’s hard to book accidentally while browsing, because you won’t enter credit card information until several screens later.

We know what you’re thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to book an Airbnb in a different part of town and have a huge party there? Get that idea right out of your head. Some hosts decline locals for that very reason. And nearly all have a “no party” policy spelled out in the “Rules” section of the listing.

Lest we make them sound like a lot of rule-driven party poopers, however, the half-dozen Superhosts we consulted seemed motivated by hospitality and a genuine desire to give their guests a quality experience, as well as an interest in making a little folding money. Although some of the higher-end properties can generate upwards of $30,000 a year, the average income for hosts is about $6,000 to $8,000 a year. At all of the Airbnbs we visited, we found snacks, drinks, coffee,  guest books filled with positive messages, and a wide variety of art and design, although Elvis has clearly not left the building in many of these places!

Central Gardens is the heart of Airbnb Memphis; one might think folks in the city’s central residential quarter saw the company coming a century ago. With its many carriage houses, garage apartments, studios, in-law wings, and backhouses, Midtown is a staycationer’s playground. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Midtown exploded with bungalows, Queen Annes, and four-squares to form the city’s historic corridor. “Carriage house” was a fancier way of saying “stable,” reminds historian Perre Magness. Up through the 1910s, horses and cows would have been stabled in these outbuildings. With the arrival of the automobile in the 1920s, these spaces became garages, and spaces above them became desirable guest accommodations. Today, the owner is often on-site to field questions or provide directions, if asked.

Wherever you go in Memphis, however, an Airbnb is probably not very far away. Here’s our pick of a few staycation gems that might appeal to you and your visiting friends.

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Private Cottage in Midtown

Type of listing: Guest house

Area: Central Gardens

Ideal for: Seeing architectural delights and having fun in Cooper-Young

Price per night: About $73 before fees 

Not far from Central  Avenue, Patrick McCabe’s ”Private Cottage in Midtown“ is a five-minute walk from just about everything Memphis’ first modern suburb has to offer. A little west of Cooper, the bedroom/living room/kitchenette behind McCabe’s house is just right for a couple in search of an urban adventure. It’s comfortably furnished, private, and convenient to destinations east and west.

It’s an easy Lyft to downtown, but on a fair weekend, Central Gardens itself is an attraction. All the major architectural styles of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century are represented. We recommend a morning walking tour; check out centralgardens.org for more information. There are great places nearby to get coffee (Otherlands) and cupcakes (Muddy’s) and no end of historic homes, most dating from the first quarter of the twentieth century. Check out churches like Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal and Immaculate Conception, Memphis’ Catholic cathedral. And don’t forget to stroll along Belvedere Avenue, right out the front door of the cathedral, where the city’s cotton merchants built exceptional mansions in the 1920s.

Also not far from McCabe’s place is Cooper-Young. This residential district’s homes are more modest than those of Central Gardens, but equally historic and well worth the walk. The restaurant and retail heart of Cooper-Young features all kinds of cuisine, a distinctive Irish pub (Celtic Crossing), a drum shop, a cat sanctuary, and Burke’s Books, Memphis’ oldest bookstore established in 1875.

When Patrick McCabe moved to Memphis in 2013 for a second career (after his first one in the U.S. Army), he purchased the 1922 property for its historic charm and income potential. “Hosting keeps your hand in the game,” he says, “and it’s truly fun and interesting meeting people from all over the U.S. and from around the world.” 

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That ’70s Room

Type of listing: Private room in owner-occupied home, with shared bath

Area: Just east of Memphis International Airport

Ideal for: Youngsters, gamers, animal lovers

Price per night: About $27 before fees

Our nominee in the “most faithful to its theme” category is ”That ’70s Room,“ a little east of Memphis International Airport. Spinning on the name of a popular period comedy (That ’70s Show ran eight seasons in the early 2000s), it offers a colorful explosion of nostalgia for the era just before the average Airbnb guest, age 30 to 35, was born. A visitor half expects the Bee Gees to burst out of the bathroom in a cloud of hairspray.

A private room in a tidy, newer home, this room has been reviewed more than 200 times, usually favorably. The host, Robert Bacon, answers most questions within the hour. In April, the nightly rate was $32, so with taxes and fees, the total cost of booking was $57.

Robert and his sister, Melissa Rittenhouse, painted the walls with chalk paint to enhance the psychedelic color scheme. The walls have been turned into the siblings’ unofficial guest book, and guests write messages like “Go Vegan” or “Groovy Place.” 

“One time we heard these older people in there just laughing, going wild drawing on the walls,” Bacon explains. “These adults are like kids in a candy store when you give them a stick of chalk.”

Guests are free to use the kitchen, the front porch, and the shared living room, or they can retreat to the beanbag chair in the guest room, or to the memory-foam queen bed piled with pillows for some downtime. The bathroom, decorated with Robert’s collection of vintage fedoras, can also be a shared situation if the other guest room is booked. And if Sparta, the unofficial greeting cat, isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you’ll have more in common with Gizmo, the pit bull.

Because it’s the nearest Airbnb to the airport, ”That ’70s Room“ gets a lot of first-time Airbnb users. For a staycationer, we’d recommend this as an entry-level experience to see if house-sharing is for you. And really, how can you call yourself a Memphian if you haven’t seen Graceland, just 10 minutes away from here?

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The Garden View

Type of listing: Private room in owner-occupied home

Area: East Memphis

Ideal for: Fugitives from Downtown festivals

Price per night: About $47 before fees with a two-night minimum 

So that hip apartment in the heart of downtown isn’t so much fun on Friday nights when sports fans, limousines full of prom-goers, and festival detours are blocking your parking garage? What you need is to chill out in the suburbs. And at $140 for two nights, ”The Garden View” delivers peace and quiet with an international flavor. 

Superhost Juliet Jones and her husband, Ed, live on a quiet cove, a stone’s throw from shopping, restaurants, and theaters. Recent guests include a couple married 56 years, snowbirds going back home to Canada, and three graduate students from Iowa attending a conference at The Peabody.

”The Garden View“ has outstanding staycation potential. Want to practice your college French or Spanish? Juliet is fluent in both. Save the planet? Place your tea bag in the compost bin, please. Hang out in your slippers? Juliet and Ed provide them, since they follow the Japanese and Scandinavian custom of removing shoes at the door.

A private bathroom and a Continental breakfast should be enough to overcome any reservations about occupying a shared space. And if you still need breathing room, there’s the garden. Planted in the style of a European parterre garden, each section is devoted to species that display sequentially. The textural spiral garden features several varieties of sedum. A Japanese paper bush nestles up to the deck. Behind massive azaleas, guests can draw up a chair and not be seen from the house or other yards.

Juliet and Ed belong to the fastest-growing segment of Airbnb hosts: retirees. Airbnbs run by senior hosts earn five-star reviews at a consistently higher level than others. “I think people relate to us,” Juliet says. “We put our picture in our listing and it makes us approachable.”

Consider this review from March: “This is a gem! Juliet and Ed were gracious hosts and very attentive. In our opinion the bed was just right, a very good night's sleep. Wake up to French press gourmet coffee, artisan toast of your choice, honey and homemade jam, and cardinals to greet you from the kitchen windows. [There are] fresh flowers in the room and throughout this well-appointed home.”

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The Hen House

Type of listing: Guest house

Area: Near the Annesdale-Snowden Historic District

Ideal for: Swimmers, chicken lovers, and downtown explorers

Price per night: About $70 before fees

Carolyn and Dino Grisanti are busy teachers and parents, but there’s always room for one more in ”The Hen House,“ their detached one-bedroom listing. Their Airbnb is on the edge of the Annesdale-Snowden Historic District, a few doors east of Ashlar Hall. Here we encountered our favorite piece of Memphis-themed art: a souvenir photo dated 1956 from the “Memphis Zoological Garden,” featuring young father Johnny Cash; on his lap sits an alert baby girl in a frothy dress, Rosanne Cash, born in 1955.

Carolyn, also a volunteer at the zoo, found a photo and had it enlarged for the guest house. ”The Hen House“ was built in the 1980s, probably on the site of the original stable. “Horseshoes have been found in the ground right around it,” Carolyn says.

The place takes its name from the actual hen house in the backyard. Ten heirloom hens lay farm-fresh eggs in a coop a few steps away from the guest house, but at least there’s no rooster to disturb your sleep at 5 a.m. The hens are beautiful to behold in their many shades of red, and some of them perform antics at feeding time (which made us think twice about ordering the chicken parm last night).

Don’t forget your swimsuit; this house has an enormous pool, but since it’s not fenced or watched by a lifeguard, we don’t recommend The Hen House for a staycation with small children. The kitchen is above average, and gated parking with a remote opener is a plus.

Were we to book this property, we would do this: Pick a hot Friday night and have a long swim before striking out for South Main, just a few minutes away by car. There, we’d order a Ms. Polly’s Greek Lover pizza at The Arcade, open since 1919, and then stroll among the galleries and shops on Trolley Night, held the last Friday of every month.

The next morning would be about bicycling. You can bring your own, or check out Bike Share at 11 W. Huling a few miles away, scheduled to have bikes on the ground this month. Riding the Big River Crossing across the Harahan Bridge is another Memphis Must as far as we’re concerned, just like Graceland. Or you can walk the long span; the access is on Channel 3 Drive.

When the banker J.S. White built the Grisanti’s turreted stone house in 1902, he had little idea that a hundred years hence it would become an ersatz hotel. “The best part is getting to be a tour guide in your own city,” explains Carolyn. “We get to recommend our favorite restaurants, breweries, and local shops, as well as must-see-and-do things in Memphis.” 

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Relax near Overton Square/Park

Type of listing: Garage apartment

Area: East End — Overton Square and Overton Park

Ideal for: Bikers, theater lovers, foodies, couples

Price per night: About $99 before fees

When we meet Leanna Morris, she and her husband Graham are debating the best strategy to hoist a new mattress up the stairs to the Airbnb above their garage. Replacing a lumpy queen bed must be what makes her a Superhost. Behind a brick wall and up one flight of enclosed hardwood stairs, there is nothing about this apartment near Overton Square — Midtown’s premier entertainment district — to suggest that cars and bicycles reside below.

With windows on three sides, this Zen blend has garden views and a private entrance. Beautifully furnished with all the modern amenities, a guest is tempted to spend his whole stay staring out the window of this spacious aerie. But it’s too close to the action to unplug; you can do that at home.

Being in the East End neighborhood (which was the east end of the city when the parkways were built in 1899) puts one within walking distance of Studio on the Square, Playhouse on the Square, Ballet Memphis, and the Hattiloo Theatre. This makes for an ideal theater weekend, with a play, a movie, and a meal. If you choose to use The Roo, a 17-passenger bus with a kangaroo theme, you can pay $5 on weekend nights to shuttle between Overton Square and Cooper-Young. (See RIDETHEROO.COM for details.)

Daytime is for Overton Park, a five-minute walk in the other direction from Leanna’s place. In addition to other nearby attractions like Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Levitt Shell, and the zoo, there’s a farmers market every Thursday at the East Pavillion, yoga on Thursdays at the Brooks, and nature hikes through the 126-acre Old Forest periodically (see OVERTONPARK.ORG).

But if your energy is low and you want to cocoon in the Morris’ sun-filled space, you wouldn’t be the first. “I had this one lady recently, who was the stressed-out foster mother of four,” says Leanna. “She never left the apartment.” 

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Sojourn of Harbor Town

Type of listing: Entire place to yourself

Area: Mud Island

Ideal for: A wedding anniversary or a BFF-y reunion

Price per night: About $175 before fees

A listing that combines “island living” with proximity to downtown is called ”Sojourn of Harbor Town,“ a two-bedroom house on a quiet cul de sac on Mud Island. Many visitors to the island, including Sojourn’s owner, see the restaurants and the river and simply head back east over the A.W. Willis Bridge, without exploring the residential neighborhoods to the north.

“I had never made it past Paulette’s, honestly,” until shopping for an investment property downtown, says Ailene Morisy, owner of Sojourn. She and her husband, Lee, bought Sojourn last year the same day she saw the listing online. “We felt like we had discovered a little gem inside the city. This neighborhood is like its own little resort community.”

An Elvis bobblehead on the mantel sets the mood of Sojourn: Don’t take yourself so seriously. A stack of board games and puzzles promotes playtime. The one-story house features two queen-size bedrooms with private en suite baths. Contemporary art and a glass dining table add to the spacious, vacation feel of the house.

If you checked “entire place to yourself” at the start of the Airbnb search, this one ticks all the boxes: ample parking, spotless new decor, and the makings for coffee no matter what time you check in. And an ideal picnic spot under the nearby weeping willow once you have acquired a few provisions. Recent renovations to Miss Cordelia’s Grocery have brought expanded choices in wines, craft beers, prepared meals, flowers, and artisan soaps. If you book during the week, Wednesday is food truck night with live music on the north side of the store. 

Like a lot of “new urban” communities (Seaside, Florida, comes to mind), Mud Island is best enjoyed by bicycle. From Sojourn, it’s about a five-minute ride to a water view.

Heading north, Island Place terminates at the Wolf River Trailhead, a 1.3-mile section of pedestrian and bike path added to the Wolf River Greenway last year. 

Still on bicycle, cut in anywhere on River Park, which runs the length of the island on the river side, for broad views of the bridges, the sandbars on the Arkansas side, the meanders to the north, and the skyline to the south. 

We like poking about the east side of the island, particularly the gravel path that rims the Harbor Town neighborhood beginning at Music Park. From Harbor Isle Circle South, look south to the Pyramid, now home to Bass Pro Shops. Below is the marina where river-going boats are docked and the Coast Guard station is on the far side. A gravel path winds by the Wolf River Lagoon, through woodlands and wetlands until the bank becomes too brushy for foot traffic. Harbor Town proper is eminently walkable, and peering into the “secret courtyards” from the sidewalk is not considered nosy in this context. 

By car, it’s interesting to check out the north end of the peninsula via North Second Street, where you will find the Jacob Burkle Estate, also known as Slave Haven. In 1997, it opened at 826 N. Second as a museum about the underground railroad. Antebellum houses weren’t all Greek Revival mansions with Corinthian columns, as Hollywood would have us believe; most were modest homes like this, the one-story home of a German immigrant, stockyard owner, and reputed abolitionist. See slavehavenmemphis.com. 

High above the dog-walkers, cyclists, and runners on Island Drive, civilized staycationers can toast the end of the day at The Terrace, the open-air bar on the fourth floor of the River Inn. They offer small plates and custom cocktails like a “Mississippi Sunset” with vodka, triple sec and strawberry liqueur. Perhaps your companion would enjoy a “Long Kiss Goodnight” (also an adult beverage). A couple of tried-and-true restaurants have a Harbor Town address, but more adventurous dining will require a five-minute drive to Downtown proper. See the restaurant guide on pages 86-95 of this issue.

Which brings us full circle to the conundrum of staycation: Will I feel as restored as if I had gone somewhere? The answers are in the guest books.

Remember the stressed-out mom who craved a little time for herself? She wrote: “I am a local foster mom who has a 19-year-old, 8-year-old, 5-year-old, and 8-month-old at home. I came here exhausted and in need of a break. This comfortable and quiet apartment ... had everything I needed to relax. The Keurig [coffee maker] was well-appreciated, as well as the filtered water.

“As I leave, I am ready to go face the many challenges that await me. Thanks, Katie.”