The Grand Hotel's front porch is the longest in the world, a sweeping colonnade that stretches along the bluff face overlooking a manicured Tea Garden and the resort-scale swimming pool named for Esther Williams. The pool honors the swimmer and actress who starred in the 1947 musical comedy This Time for Keeps, filmed at the hotel alongside Jimmy Durante. From the porch, guests watch the five-mile Mackinac Bridge connect Michigan's two peninsulas across water that shifts from steel gray to brilliant blue depending on the hour. Thomas Edison arranged demonstrations of his phonograph on this same porch, and Mark Twain made the hotel a regular stop on his Midwest speaking tours. Five sitting presidents have walked the halls: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. The hotel charges non-guests a fee just to step onto the porch and take in the view, a policy that draws grumbles but also underscores what everyone already knows: there is no porch like it anywhere.

Interior designer Carleton Varney, a protege of the legendary Dorothy Draper, gave the Grand Hotel its signature look: bold geranium patterns, vivid color combinations, and a deliberate rule that no two guest rooms should be identical. Seven suites bear the names and personal design touches of former First Ladies. The Jacqueline Kennedy Suite features a gold presidential eagle woven into navy blue carpet. The Nancy Reagan Suite is awash in her signature red. The Rosalynn Carter Suite displays a sample of the china designed for the Carter White House, its walls covered in Georgia peach. The Betty Ford Suite mixes green and cream with a dash of red. The Barbara Bush Suite blends Maine and Texas influences in pale blue and pearl. Each room becomes a small museum of presidential taste, a gallery of American domestic aesthetics filtered through the sensibilities of the women who shaped the White House.

Mackinac Island bans motor vehicles. No cars, no trucks, no motorcycles, only horses, bicycles, and feet. Emergency vehicles and winter snowmobiles are the sole exceptions. Guests arriving at the dock board horse-drawn carriages for the climb to the hotel, the clip of hooves on asphalt the only engine noise on the island. The ban makes the Grand Hotel feel genuinely transported in time, a place where the pace of arrival sets the pace of the stay. The island's small airport offers a landing strip for private aircraft but no fuel or services, and horse-drawn taxis carry passengers from the runway to any island destination. The only automobiles allowed in recent memory were the cars brought over for the filming of Somewhere in Time, the 1980 romance starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Every October, fans of the film gather at the hotel for an annual convention, retracing scenes through hallways and gardens that look nearly unchanged from the movie.

The Grand Hotel's history tracks alongside the history of American preservation itself. Mackinac Island became the nation's second National Park in 1875, two years before the hotel was even conceived, though it later transitioned to a Michigan State Park in 1895. The hotel received its State Historic Building designation in 1957, joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was elevated to National Historic Landmark status on June 29, 1989. Travel publications have piled on accolades: Conde Nast Traveler placed it on its Gold List, Travel + Leisure named it among the world's top 100 hotels, and AAA awarded it a four-diamond rating. For nearly nine decades, the Musser family owned and operated the Grand Hotel, until Dan Musser III announced the sale to KSL Capital Partners in September 2019. The hotel also gave the world an unlikely holiday: World Sauntering Day, born here in the 1970s, a gentle protest against the rush of modern life, perfectly suited to a place where the fastest vehicle has four legs.