The north shore of Kauai is the part of the island that people mean when they say Kauai is the most beautiful of the Hawaiian islands, which is a strong claim and one that the landscape around the inn makes without apparent effort. Hanalei Valley with its taro fields and mountains behind them, the bay itself with that particular curve, the road to the end of the highway at Ke'e Beach where the Na Pali coast starts and the pavement just stops - all of it is within reach of the inn and none of it has become ordinary despite however many photographs of it exist.
Kapaa is the closest town of any real size and it's a genuine north shore Hawaii town rather than a resort construction, with local restaurants and coffee shops and a farmers market and the kind of daily life that moves at a pace the south shore resort corridor doesn't quite manage. The bike path along the coast near Kapaa is one of those things that locals use and visitors discover and immediately wish they'd known about sooner - flat, coastal, several miles long, the ocean on one side and the green hills on the other.
Hanalei town is the social center of the north shore - small, genuinely charming, one main street with a handful of good restaurants and shops and a general atmosphere of a place that knows it's beautiful and is pleasantly unbothered about it. The bay is right there. Because of course it is. The Wednesday farmers market in Hanalei is worth building a morning around, the produce and prepared food from the local farms is a specific category of Hawaii eating that you can't replicate at a resort restaurant regardless of how good the chef is.
Na Pali coast is accessible from the north shore trailhead at Ke'e Beach, and the Kalalau Trail that starts there is one of the genuinely great hiking experiences in the American national park system - not because it's easy, it isn't, but because the first two miles to Hanakapi'ai Beach are accessible to most reasonably fit people and give you a view of that coastline from the trail that no boat tour or helicopter can quite match because you're in it rather than looking at it from outside.