How One Couple Uprooted Their Life to Open an Inn in the Catskills

It’s Never Too Late is a series about people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.

In 2019, Maureen McNamara and her wife, Jennifer Stark, now both 60, took a leap of faith and decided to sell their popular restaurant, Amici’s Kitchen & Living Room, in the Detroit suburb of Berkley, Mich. The couple had owned it for 15 years. They packed up all their belongings — including two Shih Tzus named Junie and George — and moved to the tiny hamlet of Phoenicia, N.Y., nestled in the Catskill Mountains, about 100 miles north of New York City.

“We had lost our passion and had become extremely burned out,” Ms. McNamara said. “We bought the restaurant from Jen’s brother, so it never felt like ours. We wanted something that was.”

That something was the Phoenicia Lodge, a collection of rustic, 1940s cabins with wooden planks, made up of five rooms, two suites and six independent cottages that the couple bought in the beginning of 2020. (Rates start at $135 a night.)

“Jennifer had a place in Woodstock and knew the area. I would visit with my kids,” said Ms. McNamara, who has two children, Anthony, 29, and Rory, 27, with her ex-husband. “It resonated that this was a good place.”

The women met in school and reconnected in 2000 when they attended their 20th reunion at Dondero High School, in Royal Oak, Mich. Ms. McNamara, a production manager at an advertising firm, was married and living in Huntington Woods, a Detroit suburb. Ms. Stark, who was in a same-sex relationship, was living in Manhattan and working at Atlantic Records’ A&R department to find promising new artists. Their spark and attraction was surprising and undeniable to them both.

The following year Ms. McNamara got divorced; Ms. Stark broke up with her partner and moved back to Michigan to be closer to Ms. McNamara. In 2015 they were married at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle in Detroit.

Two days before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, they welcomed their first Phoenicia Lodge guest. Then the world shut down. Still, the couple endured, and so has their inn. “This experience has been exciting and magical,” Ms. McNamara said. “It’s a slower, calmer pace. And we’re turning a profit. That feels really good!” (The following interview with Ms. McNamara has been edited and condensed.)

What made you sell your restaurant and buy an inn on the East Coast?

Because we had both lost our parents and my kids were grown, we had a freedom to create…