Andiamo Lodge

Andiamo Lodge occupies a bend of Lookout Mountain in Mentone, Alabama, in a building that once housed the old Shiloh Lodge before Colleen Duffley and her husband Steve Carpenter stumbled onto it during a bike ride through town. Duffley, a photographer and creative director whose work has run in Neiman Marcus and Traditional Home, spotted a for sale sign on the vacant property and called the discovery kismet. Carpenter brought more than thirteen years of restaurant experience from Crabby Steve’s Bar and Gulfside Restaurant in Florida. Together the couple renovated the property into what they call Alabama’s first experience lodge, a phrase that captures both the ambition and the informality of the place.

The lodge is built around curated guest rooms rather than a long hallway of identical units. Rooms carry wood burning fireplaces, high end linens, and the kind of considered furnishings that come from Duffley’s design background, giving each space its own personality instead of a uniform hotel look. Beyond a place to sleep, Andiamo Lodge organizes hosted experiences for guests, ranging from culinary classes drawing on Carpenter’s restaurant background to art instruction informed by Duffley’s creative work, plus outdoor adventures like rock climbing and kayaking that take advantage of the area’s terrain near Little River Canyon and DeSoto State Park.

Duffley describes the whole venture as a love story that started with a bike ride and ended with an unwitting undertaking, and that origin story runs through the way the lodge operates. It is not a chain property with a corporate playbook. It is two people who fell for a mountain town and decided to build something specific to it, drawing on both of their professional backgrounds rather than importing a generic hospitality formula from somewhere else entirely.

The rustic luxe label the owners use for the property fits what shows up in its rooms and common spaces, reclaimed materials and warm textures paired with modern comforts, without tipping into anything precious or fussy. Guests come for the rooms, but many stay for the programming, whether that means a hands on cooking session pulled from Carpenter’s restaurant menu, a painting workshop led by a visiting artist, or simply a guided hike arranged by the lodge into the surrounding hills and hollows of the mountain.

Studio b, the art gallery and creative space Duffley separately established in Alys Beach, gives some sense of the sensibility she has carried north to Mentone, a preference for programming that treats guests as participants rather than spectators. That same instinct shows up in how Andiamo Lodge schedules its offerings, rotating seasonal workshops rather than sticking to a fixed, repeated menu of activities year round.

Location plays into the appeal as much as the rooms themselves. Mentone sits within a short drive of DeSoto Falls, Little River Canyon National Preserve, and the broader network of hiking trails that draw visitors to the top of Lookout Mountain, and Andiamo Lodge positions itself as a basecamp for exploring all of it while still offering a reason to spend an evening on site rather than driving back into town for dinner. The property is located at 3450 County Road 106 in Mentone, and can be reached by phone at (214) 415-0476 or by email through its website for booking inquiries and questions about upcoming workshops and classes.

As one of a small number of independently owned lodging businesses actually operating within Mentone proper, Andiamo Lodge stands out for treating a stay less like a transaction and more like a planned visit, curated by two owners who live with the results of their renovation every day and keep adjusting the experience based on who walks through the door.