"From a glance at the place, you’d think there’d been some mistake — surely this lush neoclassical red-brick monument, now home to the Blackburn Inn, couldn’t have begun its life as the Western State Lunatic Asylum. Then again, Virginia isn’t like most places; nor is the town of Staunton, in the Shenandoah Valley, 40 miles to the west of Charlottesville. And while we’ve seen institutions converted into boutique hotels before, few of them began with such lavish raw material as the Blackburn Inn." - Tablet Hotels