The brick building at 504 Third Street has been many things to Rocheport over the past century. Built around 1914, it served as the town’s public school — four rooms, grades one through twelve — until 1972, when the Rocheport district merged with a neighbor and the school closed. The building waited. Previous owners bought it in 1986, spent fifteen months restoring it, and opened it in April 1988 as the first bed and breakfast in Rocheport and one of the first in Missouri.
It has held onto that reputation ever since. In 2023, Missouri Life named it Best Traditional Bed & Breakfast in its Best of Missouri Life awards, and it has repeatedly placed in Rural Missouri Magazine’s readers’ choice rankings. Over the years it has been featured in Southern Living, Midwest Living, 417 Magazine, and USA Today, and it draws strong marks on TripAdvisor — the kind of steady word-of-mouth that keeps a small inn booked on fall weekends.
Inside, the School House grew from its original six rooms to eleven, each with a private bath and furnished to suit the building’s age; three have two-person jetted tubs. Breakfast is served each morning. The front door is a couple of blocks from the Katy Trail, which means the typical guest arrives by bicycle, by car, or some mix of the two — and the trail is a big part of the story. When it opened through Rocheport in the 1990s, it turned the town’s quiet survival into something closer to a destination.
The building itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, and so is much of downtown Rocheport, which is a National Register historic district. This town figured out a long time ago that the best thing to do with an old school building is fill it with good beds, good coffee, and guests who appreciate both.
Rates and booking are on the inn’s own site — schoolhousebb.com — or see the School House listing.