February 9, 2007

By JO MCINTYRE
Capital Press Agriculture News

CARLTON, Ore. - "We live in a painting anyway," Judi Stuart said to her husband, John, as she designed the décor for their new bed and breakfast business here.

So, she introduced the concept of country contemporary and kept the bedrooms simple at their Abbey Road Far, a former 82-acre horse farm they have changed into a multiproduct farm, events center and B&B.

So far, that's not so novel for the proliferating rural hospitality businesses here in Yamhill, Country, but the B&B part of the Abbey Road Farm is in the three former grain silos. The silo remodel resulted in five bedrooms, each with a bath, and small meeting room with washroom nearby.

This decorating style uses as many natural products as possible and avoids clutter. It prohibits cheesy paintings in the rooms. Except for a few simple artworks, the windows do the decorating because of the gorgeous landscape visible from every direction.

It's an attractive concept for the wine tasters and bicycle club members who have become some of the farm's best customers. They also love the ever-changing views of neighboring vineyards and the fact that they are staying on a working far,.

Guests can enjoy the cherry orchard, a flower and vegetable garden, a restored wetland/marsh used as a drainfield and to attract birds and other wildlife, and llamas, goats and donkeys running about in fenced enclosures, before they rush off to yet another wine-tasting room. The Stuarts use many of their own products on the farm.

The goats supply goat-milk soap, available in the gift shop, and wineries serve the farm's goat cheese for wine tastings. Excess goats are sold or cooked for meat.

Cherries the guests don't pick themselves are harvested. Breakfasts feature eggs from the farm's own exotic variety chickens and garden vegetables for omelets.

In just three-and-a-half years, Stuart, a self-described "city slicker" and his wife have turned the former Cloepfil farm, famous for the past five decades as a horse facility, into a trendy, yet heavily ag-influenced business.

Stuart was raised in Europe, but he and wife Judi spent nearly 30 years in the insurance industry in Nevada working with casinos and hotels. Judi does have ag experience since she grew up on a family farm in Northern Kentucky and has been a horsewoman. Their BB manager Jackie Schroeder also was born on a farm and raised in Michigan.

There are many buildings on the farm property, all identified with old-fashioned looking black and white painted metal signs ("office" "shop" "B&B Dining") for Stuart's fellow "city slickers" staying on a farm for the first time.

As he and Judi were considering how to achieve their goal of creating a profitable family farm for themselves and their children on such small acreage while using the skills, talents and products of local residents, one of their early brainstorms was to turn the silos into bedrooms.

"Not being a farmer, I had no idea what to do with them," Stuart said of the silos. He said he's always loved the outdoors, so he was interested in meeting that challenge.

Even he could see that there wasn't enough acreage to run a grain business. However, he did want to reuse part of the property and rehabilitate the old family farm.

"That was large in my mind," he said. "I looked for something that would be symbiotic with the rest of the farm. So turning them into a B&B seemed like a good idea to me."

The rehabilitation fit some of his and Judi's other goals, as well: to restore a small wetland area; maintain the rural atmosphere in the midst of changing land used from grass seed and fruit orchard, to vineyards and soon, olive orchards; and become part of the local community.

The silos did present some engineering challenges, Stuart says. Just putting square windows in a round silo wasn't easy. And a question that arose in many locals' minds as they heard his plans was how to deal with the high temperatures a silo can reach in the summer. Stuart knew he would have to insulate, so he chose to over-insulate by about 50 percent. He used spray-on foam insulation from the bottom to the top of each structure.

The secret to keeping the silos cool in summer, he realized, is to open windows at night and close them in the daytime. Reverse the process for winter. Rooms have radiant floor heat, so guests can walk around barefoot.

"The unique part of this is that these (silos) are luxurious accommodations," Stuart says. There are great mattresses, fine linens, jacuzzi tubs, warming rails for towels. New visitors are often surprised, expecting a more rustic style.

In keeping with country contemporary concepts, they took some of the dead black walnut and white oak trees on the property and turned them into staircases leading to the upstairs bedrooms. The wood was hand-crated by a crew of local workers.

Then, students from the Yamhill-Carlton High School wood shop department used the wood to make the stairs. "We sure were happy with what they did," Stuart says. "We gave a scholarship to the school for that and for the birdhouses they built for us."

Parr Lumber and Lowe's also made contributions of materials, equipment and tools for the high school at the suggestion of John Stuart. The Stuarts also have done some work with FFA students.

"The best part of what we've done is become part of this Carlton community," Stuart says.