Guest House

Wrightsville Beach, NC · January 2025

There is something quietly surreal about a beach hotel in a blizzard… The sun loungers still face the ocean and the palm trees stand perfectly upright, unbothered, as if no one told them. The pool sits glassy and still, reflecting a sky so blue it looks like a lie. Underneath it all, a thick layer of snow that has no business being in North Carolina.

That’s the image I keep coming back to from our January stay at Trailborn Surf & Sound in Wrightsville Beach. We hadn’t planned to be there long. We hadn’t planned to be stranded for two days while a historic storm shut down the airport, closed every restaurant in town, and turned a quick coastal trip into something softer, slower, and entirely its own.
We were there for my dad’s wedding, a small, intimate gathering of family on the Atlantic in the dead of winter. My dad is a meteorologist. He has it in his will that I scatter his ashes in the path of a tornado. He loved every minute of this.
When the storm rolled in, Trailborn became the whole world. We spent long stretches in the lobby, warm light, the kind of easy company that only happens when no one has anywhere to be. My family drifted in and out, unhurried. Mornings began at La Duna, the onsite restaurant, where breakfast felt less like an anchor for the day. The building sits between two bodies of water, the Intracoastal on one side, the Atlantic on the other, and from the balcony, both felt impossibly calm beneath the snow.
What struck me most about Trailborn as a brand is how well it held the unexpected. A surf hotel in a blizzard could feel like a punchline. Instead, it felt like a refuge. The warmth of the interiors, the textures, the light, the unhurried pace of the staff, all of it held up even as the weather outside turned the place’s premises completely upside down. That’s a brand doing its job.
I spent a lot of time with my camera. The light during a snowstorm at the coast has a quality I hadn’t experienced before, diffused but bright, the white of the ground bouncing everything upward. The interiors read warmer against it. The outdoor spaces looked like a fever dream and a still life combined. I wasn’t trying to make Trailborn look like something it wasn’t. I was trying to show it exactly as it was, which turned out to be more interesting than anything we could have planned.
My dad got married in the snow, surrounded by the people he loves most, at a surf hotel on a beach that hadn’t seen weather like this in decades. The palms didn’t flinch. Neither did he.