Go Niche

Surely Richard Gere knew he was asking for trouble by opening a B&B. If he didn’t, the immediate invasion by a busload of middle aged Monégasques, on a gardening tour of the region, will have alerted him to that fact. The newbie restaurateur says he had to shout at the women, in a tone decidedly more officer than gentleman, to get off the walls they were scaling in their determination to see him. Whether he was worried about their safety or his is unclear.

But what did he expect? His eight-bedroom guest house, the Bedford Post Inn, is in leafy Westchester County, an hour from Manhattan. It would want to have been on Mars for him to avoid gawpers. Gere seems to insist the inn was really created to give horsey locals, including Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren, a place to hang out. He’s only short of saying he wanted to give something back to the community.

In fact it’s worse. “There are a lot of very effective people who live up here, and I saw this on one level as a clubhouse for these people to engage on levels that might be of benefit to the world,” said Gere, now commonly referred to as the Silver Fox. But the actor, who also runs a yoga studio at the Inn, is talking through his mula bandha if he doesn’t count on the place being in fact a clubhouse for star-struck women of a certain age who want to say they’ve slept with Richard Gere.

bedfordpostinn.com