Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Zen student Marshall Elliott at Hope Cottage on Thursday, August 12, 2010

Perched high on a wild ridge in the Marin Headlands, solitary Hope Cottage has for decades been the unlikeliest of refuges.

The small structure, built by a co-founder of Polaroid for his dying wife, is almost hidden in a small grove of Monterey cypress, with a commanding view of the Headlands and the Pacific Ocean. It is surrounded by National Park Service land and is accessible only by a 30-minute hike up a rough road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center near Muir Beach.

For the past 15 years, the center has rented Hope Cottage to anyone hale enough to haul his gear up and down the mountain. With its walls of windows overlooking the sea, stone hearth, thick Oriental carpets and tiny kitchen stocked with provisions, Hope Cottage is a unique, idyllic place to stay in the Bay Area.

But maintaining it is proving to be a headache that is perhaps too much for even Zen Buddhists to bear. It needs a new roof. And new windows. And new plumbing. Hours of labor are required to prepare it for each new guest, as freshly chopped firewood, water, propane and other supplies must be hauled up the mountain.

Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Hope Cottage on Thursday, August 12, 2010

Then, in perhaps the last straw this June, the local Roto-Rooter truck driver refused to make his annual trip up the deteriorating fire road to pump out Hope Cottage’s septic tank. He eventually relented, but faced with all these demands to maintain a property that operates at a loss, the center has stopped accepting reservations for Hope Cottage past the end of this year.

“We wanted to create a pause to make us think about it,” said the center’s executive director, Jeremy Levie, as he hiked up to Hope Cottage on a rare sunny afternoon.

The options are to close it or to renovate it and greatly increase the price, which is currently $250 on weekends. But Zen Buddhists charging Ritz Carlton rates becomes a cultural issue. “The basic ethos here is inclusiveness,” Levie said. The center also maintains a 15-room guesthouse on the valley floor.

Hope Cottage has a history as romantic as its setting. After World War II, George W. Wheelwright III and his wife, Hope, bought 800 acres encompassing Green Gulch Valley and much of what is now Muir Beach. Wheelwright was a co-founder of Polaroid, and Wheelwright was raised in a chateau near Paris before graduating from the exclusive Foxcroft School in Virginia.

The couple ran the property as a dairy farm. When Hope grew ill with cancer, Wheelwright, still a scientist at heart, “dived into research and experiments with laetrile and other controversial drugs in an unsuccessful attempt to cure her,” his New York Times obituary noted in 2001.

Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Zen student Marshall Elliott wipes down a protrait of Hope Wheelwright at Hope Cottage on Thursday, August 12, 2010

But his efforts were unsuccessful, and so he built her Hope Cottage as a sanctuary. She died in 1967.

A faded photograph of Hope Wheelwright is still on display in her cottage. Below it are Emily Dickinson’s lines:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul.

Wheelwright planned to give all his land to the National Park Service, but the agency would have torn down all the farm buildings and Hope Cottage to return the land to its natural state. That was unthinkable. So in 1971 Wheelwright sold 155 of the acres, including Hope Cottage, for $200,000 to the San Francisco Zen Center; the rest of the land went to the Park Service.

After a subsequent marriage failed, Wheelwright moved back to Green Gulch and lived with the Zen Buddhists in a small house in the valley, the empty cottage built for his wife high above.

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.