Natural Serenity

Umstead Spa channels the native terrain of North Carolina.

- BECCA HENSLEY

Banjo-picking bluegrass star Earl Scruggs credited his home state for being the soul of his characteristic talent. “My music came up from the soil of North Carolina,” he said. Driving through the state’s northeastern Piedmont region, an area rife with old pine growth, flowering dogwood trees, maples, oaks, hemlocks, wildflowers and herbs, it’s easy to intuit his inspiration. Just glimpsing the foothill-peppered terrain, a swath lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, awakens something in the heart. That’s what makes the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary — basically a suburb of Raleigh — so unique. Enveloped by 12 acres of verdant woodland near William B. Umstead State Park, it overlooks a lake and a well-marked nature path. Surprisingly, though, the stylish hotel does not lie in the bucolic countryside. Occupying prime real estate just off the highway, a few exits from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, it nevertheless melds into nature as an urban oasis and greenspace just spitting distance from the concrete jungle.