Bed and breakfast embarks on new path
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- Published on Thursday, August 11, 2016
Photos by Tony Eu. George and Susan Phillips, inside the dining room of what was once The Garden Path B&B.
By Tony Eu
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
As of Aug. 1, 2016 The Garden Path Bed & Breakfast is officially closed. George and Susan Phillips have owned the building for 11 years and operated as a B&B for 10.
The Phillips’ bought the property in 2005 from Joe and Glenda MacPhee, who owned and operated the bed and breakfast from 1997 to 2004. The Phillips’ purchase followed George’s retirement from his career as an engineer with the Canadian Armed Forces.
Now retired completely, the couple says that they don’t have any concrete plans. “We can make it up as we go,” Susan said. The sentiment was echoed by her husband George, “We’re just sort of winging it right now.” They do have a general idea what their retirement will be used for though. “We have friends and family in Saskatchewan and Alberta and so on and it just allows us to go there whenever,” Susan said. George followed, saying, “Our long term goal is to try to get back closer to our grandkids and kids in Ontario. When, where, why and how that happens, we’re one day at a time.”
“The most rewarding [part] is the people you meet,” Susan remarked of owning and operating a B&B, “We found out everybody is interesting, because you have enough time to find that out, it’s not just a ‘hi, how are you’ kind of thing.” Continuing, she explained, “Around the breakfast table you can get into it with some great conversations and everybody has interesting things to talk about.”
“The most difficult [part] is keeping the house [and the grounds] looking good,” Susan added.
The front entrance to the ex-bed and breakfast.
“What is really interesting is when you have more than one person or one couple staying so that you’ve got a mix of people sitting around the table for breakfast in the morning,” Susan said. “Just listening to the connections that they can make.” She noted one example where after talking for a few minutes, the two individuals realized they went to university together.
“In the beginning, it was interesting because often times, when people stay at a bed and breakfast, or when we have stayed in the past, bed and breakfast owners are like tourism ambassadors for the town and the area,” Susan commented. “They can fill you in on all kinds of things, but we were new to the area so we didn’t know very much,” she continued. “It was people staying here who told us all kinds of things,” Susan explained. Continuing she said, “Maybe they grew up, moved away and were coming back to visit, so we learned way more from our guests than they learned from us.”
As for the future of the property, the Phillips’ are undecided. “We’re up in the air whether we sell, whether we stay here for a year, two, three, whatever, we’re really not sure,” George said.
Susan added, “We decided we can only make one decision at a time, so we made the decision to close and we’ll take our time with this [decision].”
“We’ve approached it more as a hobby rather than a job. That’s one of the reasons that we decided it was time to stop, we were seeing it more as a job all of a sudden,” Susan said about their decision to close. “The work aspects were kind of taking over and we wanted to quit while we were still enjoying it and while we were still providing the level of service that we wanted to provide.”
Their reasoning for choosing to close on Aug. 1 was explained by George, “We had to pick a date… People reserve bed and breakfasts sometimes a year, sometimes two years in advance… We had people just last week, our last customers, they had reserved back in 2015. So we had to pick a date that we didn’t have any commitments, so Aug. 1, from then on we never had any commitments, so we decided that was the date.”
Another reason was brought up by George, “We had never had any holidays for 10 years, because the busy time’s in the summer. Susan did travel a bit, but it’s just hard [to do].” Susan added, “We could have closed for a month or two in winter and gone away for a while. And we were tossing around those kinds of ideas and then we decided if we close the business then that kind of frees us up too.” Following that idea, George continued, “You can go away on the spur of the moment, somebody can call you and away you go, you don’t have to worry about guests waiting or whatever plans.”
“We had a lot of repeat customers from all over come visit,” George mentioned. As an example, Susan added, “The last folks that were here, they always came out from Winnipeg. They just really liked it here and they started coming for family events and so on. They came for their last visit a couple of weeks ago and that was their 13th time here, so that was interesting.”
For their final remarks, the couple said, “We’d like to thank the community, they certainly made us feel welcome when we arrived and were quite excited that the house would be used as a B&B again, so we have kind of mixed feelings. We’re closing the B&B and we’re still staying in the house. The community’s losing that business, so we kind of feel bad about that and it feels kind of strange to be in the house on our own. From the minute we moved in, we took about three weeks to kind of do a little redecorating and fairly minor things, because the house was in wonderful shape, but we’ve never lived in it without it being the Garden Path Bed and Breakfast business. It seems a little strange for just two of us in a house this size, but we love the house. That’s one thing that everybody who’s ever come into the house, any of our guests have always just fallen in love with the house… It’s a wonderful landmark in town, but it’s been kept up all these years, it was built in 1903 and whoever’s owned it or lived in it has done a wonderful job of maintaining it.”
Correction: In the original verison the Phillips' were misquoted as having said that the house "wasn't in wonderful shape" when they acquired it. The correct quote reads, "From the minute we moved in, we took about three weeks to kind of do a little redecorating and fairly minor things, because the house was in wonderful shape, but we’ve never lived in it without it being the Garden Path Bed and Breakfast business." The error has since been fixed.
