Historic North Little Rock home, now a boutique inn, to get its first guests

The 120-year-old Baker House that sits just off Main Street in North Little Rock was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
The 120-year-old Baker House that sits just off Main Street in North Little Rock was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

After being closed for three years, a home in North Little Rock’s Argenta Historic District is about to get its first guests in its new life as a boutique inn.

First built in 1898, the Baker House, now simply known as The Baker, is a three-story Queen Anne Victorian-style home at 109 W. Fifth St., just off of Main Street. Co-owner and North Little Rock spokesman Nathan Hamilton said the inn has scheduled its first visitors for the "next few weekends."

“The bookings are starting to come in and we’re really excited about that,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton, along with his wife, Stacy Johnson Hamilton, purchased the home in November for $404,000 from Argenta Holdings LLC and set about restoring the property, making needed repairs and cleaning things up. They decided to fill the house with comfortable furniture, rather than antiques.

“We don’t want people to think they’re sleeping in a museum,” Hamilton said.

Even now, the two continue to make minor changes.

Each room needs to be labeled, for instance, Hamilton said, and they’re still determining what plants to put in which corner.

“Little stuff like that,” he said.

Hamilton said preparing the inn and its five bedrooms for guests was merely phase one. For phase two, he and his wife will focus on decorating outdoors, purchasing handcrafted tables and converting the area outside the home into an event space. Eventually, they hope to get The Baker’s seven fireplaces working.

As a real estate agent specializing in historical properties, the idea to purchase the home and convert it into a boutique hotel was all Stacy Johnson Hamilton’s idea, her husband said.

“Thanks to her expertise, and her decorating skills, and the friends that she has in the business, we were really able to transform this into what I would like to say is saving the Baker House for the next generation,” he said.

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