WINDSOR — Anyone who has ever dreamed of running their own country inn can now pick up one — or both — of two luxury historic inns in the Upper Valley for bargain-basement prices.

The Windsor Mansion Inn in Windsor, which last year was put up for sale at $1.4 million before the asking price was knocked down this year to $950,000, is now scheduled to be sold via online auction next month with an opening bid of $200,000, according to online postings.

Meanwhile, only 3½ miles away, the Chase House Inn in Cornish, which was acquired in a bank auction in 2013 for $415,000 and had been steadily undergoing a renovation by its owner until he died in December, has been put on the market by his estate for $790,000.

Both properties have changed hands multiple times in recent years and currently are closed.

The Windsor Mansion Inn is owned by HHK Hospitality LLC, an entity which has ties to New York Yankees team owner Hank Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner is a longtime friend of Ken Lucci, a former co-owner and operator of the inn who had a Tampa, Fla., limo business of which Steinbrenner was a client.

Tom Marsh, Windsor town manager, said representatives of HHK Hospitality met with him recently to inform the town of their plans to sell the property at auction. Formerly known as Juniper Hill Inn, the 18-room, 13,700-square-foot Windsor Mansion Inn was built in 1902 and has undergone an extensive renovation and upgrade.

Mason said the owners had planned to reopen the inn on June 1 and had been actively looking for an innkeeper.

“They said they had a national search and hundreds of applications and did person-to-person interviews,” Mason said.

But now the owner appears to be pushing aggressively to sell the property.

“My impression is they just want to be out of the business,” he said.

The online auction for Windsor Mansion Inn is scheduled to run from May 20 to 23, according to a public posting on the website of real estate broker Avison Young.

A sales agent representing the property did not respond to a request for comment.

The Chase House Inn was acquired in 2013 by Darrell Atwater, a former executive with Accenture and Huawei who spent several years restoring the 12,000 square feet of living space that combined two 18th century-era homes with an addition built in 1992. Atwater reopened the two rooms at the inn and the common living space in 2017, but succumbed to cancer in 2018, according to his obituary.

It is the birthplace and boyhood home of Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury and later chief justice of the Supreme Court when Lincoln was president.

Gary Gosselin, who is handling the sale for The Hearthside Group, said that eight of the 10 rooms still need to be completed, which helps to explain the relatively low price for the inn that has four kitchens and sits on a landscaped 38-acre property and building.

“It could also make for a very large resi dence,” Gosselin said.

John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.

Correction

The Windsor town manager is Tom Marsh. An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect name.

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