The Palmer family. Four ways to stay. One quiet corner of Arkansas.

Our Story

How this whole thing actually started.

We bought The Little Red Riviera as a place for our family — three boys, two dogs, and a lot of weekends on the river. It wasn’t supposed to be a business.

What it became was the favorite spot of pretty much everyone who came to visit us. Friends asked to borrow it. Their friends asked too. Eventually we did the math and realized we could make this place pay for itself if we were willing to share it — and that was that. The Little Red Riviera became a rental, and it’s been the kind of rental we’d want to stay in ourselves ever since.

A few years later we added Cottage in the Woods, a quieter cabin tucked into the trees near Greers Ferry Lake. Different vibe entirely — golf course down the road, lake five minutes away, woods all around. Then came The Drasco Campsite (a premium woodsy site adjacent to the cottage) and The Imagine (our family’s 28-foot travel trailer, deliverable to your destination). Together they became Lake Area Stays — our small family portfolio in one of the South’s most underrated corners.

We treat these properties the way we’d want our own family treated when they travel — and we run them ourselves, not through a hospitality corporation.

The business is run by Preston and Trish Palmer through Preston Palmer Properties, LLC, headquartered in Conway, Arkansas. We respond to messages personally. We pick the cleaning team, the linens, the coffee. We make introductions to the best guides on the river and the best tee times at the course. And we mean it when we say we’d rather make less per night and have you come back next year than nickel-and-dime you out of the experience.