Houzz Tour: Life, Love and Purpose Down on the Farm

The story of how landscape designer Connie Cunningham became a farmer and then opened a bed and breakfast has more twists and turns than a bumpy country road — but the telling reveals how love of home breeds perseverance and passion.

It begins with her mother, Patty Cunningham, a widow who raised her three children (Connie, Chris and Bob) in St. Louis by painting large murals in commercial buildings. For years Patty longed to return to the Ozark Mountains where she grew up. After she retired, she discovered a lovely 80-acre spread in a small valley outside of Morrison, Missouri (population 123), and settled down on it to raise hay and fix up its dilapidated cottage. But then her life — and the lives of her family — changed dramatically.

Photos by Carmen Troesser

Houzz at a Glance
Who lives here: Connie Cunningham lives in the nearby barn. The house operates as Gosherd Valley Cottage (a gosherd is like a shepherd for geese), a bed and breakfast.
Size: 1,200 square feet (111 square meters); 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom
Location: Near Morrison, Missouri

After 25 years on the farm, Patty developed Alzheimer’s disease. Connie, who had gone on to found a landscape design business in Chicago, moved back to Missouri to care for her mother. “She wasn’t about to leave her home, and we didn’t want her to have to,” she says. “I thought that living with her would be just a temporary thing.” But when Patty was diagnosed with lung cancer as well, Connie’s short-term situation turned into long-term living arrangements in the barn. And when Patty died, roughly four years after doctors had given her four months to live, Connie found herself with a thriving goose farm (more on that later) and an empty cottage (seen here this winter).


But before the geese and the cottage, there was the land itself, and the spell it cast on Patty Cunningham.

“While Mom was working in St. Louis, she missed farm life and a connection with the land terribly,” says Connie. “It became her big goal to go back to the Ozarks.”

When Patty bought this land, she knew it was special. “She decided this was the place she wanted to live the rest of her life. She thought it felt magical,” says Connie.

The house itself was less spellbinding. “Originally, there was a small log home that was used as a hunting cottage. Over the years it had had things added to it sporadically, but there was no plumbing or well, and the electricity was iffy,” says Connie. “Mom painted everything white and improved it somewhat, but it was still incredibly rustic, although she did add the utilities.”


With help from her children and, in a roundabout way, a gaggle of geese, Patty realized her dream of living on the farm to the end. “We were so fortunate, because although she had Alzheimer’s, she was never aggressive, suspicious or prone to wandering away. In fact, she was pleasant. She embraced life like no one else I’ve ever known,” says Connie. “Later, when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and given months to live, all she said was, ‘Well, that’s depressing.’ It didn’t really slow her down. On the day before she died, she said, ‘I’m sad.’ It was the only time I heard her say anything like that. It broke my heart.”

While caring for her mother, Connie and her siblings came up with the idea of raising geese. “It was something I could do while I was with Mom, and we thought it might help pay the taxes,” she said. “By this time the economy had crashed, and I had nothing to go back to in Chicago.” As an experiment, she ordered 32 geese to see how it would go. When she discovered she liked raising geese and learned how to care for them, she grew the flock to 200. The next season, 200 birds were added to make a gaggle of 400. Unwittingly, the family had discovered a niche market. Within a few years, the goose business was going gangbusters and had, forgive the expression, laid something of a golden egg.


Patty died on the farm, as she wished, with Connie by her side. Her last words were, “I love you. Thank you.”

Many months later, Connie decided to renovate her mother’s small cottage and turn it into a bed and breakfast, doing most of the work herself with help from her sister (Chris is her business partner in the farming and B&B venture) and friends. “When you are running a small farm, you have to cobble together an income. I saw a bed and breakfast as another potential income,” Connie says. “My friends who were visiting from the city loved the place, and had impressed on me what an exceptional life I had on this property. Until then my focus had been on caring for my mom, but I started to think that maybe people were clamoring for this type of experience.”


Inspired by a Carl Larsson print, a Swedish painter whose work embodies the Arts and Crafts movement, Connie started in the kitchen.

It was a big job. The whole house needed new electricity and plumbing updates, and new finishes (for example, linoleum was peeling off the floor in the kitchen). Because several owners had made a host of small improvements and additions over the years, the house was a patchwork of different moldings and trims. A concrete contractor had lived there before Patty and had taken the unusual measure of pouring concrete floors throughout the house.


Connie was up for the task. “Growing up, we were expected to be comfortable with tools and equipment,” she says. “As a landscape designer, I was accustomed to managing crews and construction. So, although I’d never remodeled a home myself, I wasn’t afraid to pick up a sledgehammer.”

During the Chicago winters, Connie had worked as a color consultant, and had fallen in love with the traditional colors of Swedish farmhouses for their light-reflecting nature. Using the Larsson print as a guide, she chose green with barn-red accents for the room. “People have asked me what Mom would have thought of this idea, and I know she would have loved it,” says Connie. “I think the only thing that would have annoyed her is that I painted colors on her white walls.”


Connie picked up an existing scallop detail and repeated it elsewhere in the house. For years, she had been haunting local estate sales and barn sales, so she had a large collection of vintage items. She used them, and bought more, to decorate the house (the plates that hang over the sink were gathered this way). “I’ve always been able to squeeze a penny and stretch it farther than most,” Connie says. “Because this area is somewhat remote, you can find amazing things at these sorts of sales — and it was a good way to furnish the house. Most of the things are now for sale to the guests.”

Connie says that anyone who knew her was a little horrified when she announced she planned to open a bed and breakfast. “My distaste for B&Bs is well known,” she says. “I like to have breakfast at my leisure; I don’t like to get up at a certain time and eat with strangers.” With that in mind, she put her own spin on the concept. The kitchen is stocked with breakfast items — including eggs from the farm (they also raise chickens and ducks) and local bacon.


“My mother installed these cabinets,” Connie says. “It was really smart of her, because we are out of the way and it’s good to stock up on food. The cabinets are not perfect — they are a little askew, but I think they are charming.”

Many remodel stories have a dark passage, and for Connie, it was the removal of the kitchen ceiling. “The ceiling had been sagging, and when we looked into it, we discovered the ceiling beams had been destroyed by termites. They all had to come down,” she says. “It was a potentially throw-up-your-hands-and-run moment.”

Her saving grace was strong friendships. “I started posting my remodel efforts on Facebook,” she says. “The photos would elicit a collective horrified gasp, and then people offered to help. Some friends came down and built the new rafters. Another friend came down and stayed for weeks to help me during the final push. I am blessed with really great friends.”


The adjacent guest room is part of the original log structure. “Mom added this bump-out to create a large window seat. During the remodel we put up the wall in the center and made the area two beds. I also added the scallop on top,” says Connie. “When she was alive, she loved the idea of a window seat. She would be here and the geese would come up to the window and honk, and that delighted her.”


The quilts are another local estate sale find. “They have gorgeous handwork,” says Connie. “At Christmas I have an open house, and the local women knew exactly which home these quilts had come from.”


This is a community descended from German immigrants. Other tag-sale treasures include linens embroidered with German sayings, such as this pillowcase that bids guests to sleep well.


Connie put in a lot of effort to reverse some of the decorating moves made by her mother and the long-ago concrete contractor. To visually warm up the concrete floors, she painted them to look like wood grain, which is very convincing to the naked eye. Her mother had painted the hand-hewn beams white, and rather than laboriously stripping and refinishing them, Connie also gave them a painted wood-grain-look finish.

All of the furniture was chosen for comfort. “I wanted people to come here, sit back and relax,” says Connie. “I tested each and every chair before I purchased it.” Belle, a Great Pyrenees dog, is seen here doing just that, but her original job was in the fields protecting the geese.


“I had read about the dogs and their ability to protect livestock,” says Connie. “They are bred to be guardians, to live with farm animals and protect them. They work in tandem; one stays with the animal, and the others go chase off the predators.” Seen here are Max, Belle and Angel.

When the geese are old enough, they are allowed to range freely outside, going into shelters only when need be. The coyotes circle and howl around the flock all night. “To them it must be like walking past a Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Connie says. “But once I hear my dogs barking, I know I can go to sleep, because they are doing their job. In all this time, I’ve never lost a single goose.”


Belle was the first Great Pyrenees Connie owned, and Connie makes it clear this is a special dog.

She came to Connie in an unusual way. Her former owner had abandoned Belle and his six other dogs miles from his trailer. The animal control officers who eventually rescued the pack think Belle guided the other animals back to their old (and now-deserted) home. When the officers took Belle in, her feet were bloody and shredded from traversing the country.

Connie eagerly adopted her. “The research I’d done told me to train her by holding a gosling out to her and saying firmly, ‘This is mine,’” says Connie. “I did, and it worked. She’s been an amazing dog.” Belle has recently retired and now keeps an eye on things from inside the house.


Another guest room features a traditional blue and yellow Swedish palette and a metal bed Connie had in Chicago. Since Connie’s mother was an artist, you might assume the art is Patty’s, but you would be wrong. “After all those years doing public commissions, I think she needed to be told what to paint,” Connie says. “She rarely picked up a brush out here.”


The art over the bed in the master bedroom was discovered during a barn sale. “I’ve always loved primitive art,” says Connie. “The fellow who owned the barn had had it out there for years, and it has BB pellet holes in it. He just wanted to get rid of it.”


Although she loves old things, Connie purchased this newer bed off Craigslist. “I painted and antiqued it to look old,” she says.


The living room is furnished with more cozy finds — including a faceless clock case. “My mom did the wood graining on this piece,” says Connie. “One of these days, I’ll get around to putting a clock in the case. But when I do, I plan to install something unusual, like a 13-hour clock, because no one should be looking at the time when they come down here.”


But knowing that some guests will want to work on their computers, Connie did put a desk in the living room and added Wi-Fi. “I installed the necessary modern implements, because people do have to stay in touch with their work,” she says. “But if it were up to me, I’d still have a hand pump in the kitchen.”

To counteract the urge to work, Connie placed naturalist books about local botany and wildlife on the scalloped shelves she created.


Connie says that nighttime, after the chores are done, is her time to troll Craigslist. That’s where she discovered this old dresser that become the bathroom vanity.


That’s also where she found this old claw-foot tub. “It was a heck of a challenge to get the feet on this thing,” she says. “I received it with the legs detached, and I couldn’t figure out how to reattach them. When I contacted a tub restoration group, they walked me through it.”


“It’s impossible to give a landscape designer land and not expect her to make gardens,” says Connie. “The problem is, I have a lot of other work that keeps me busy.”


Connie has created numerous vegetable beds as part of a traditional German four-square garden. “I have about 30 varieties of vegetables on the property,” she says.


The cottage opened to guests last fall just in time for the Oktoberfest in nearby Hermann. “It seems to draw the right kind of people, those who appreciate a farm,” says Connie. “The area has a lot to offer — including a lot of festivals and wineries — but it seems like the guests also enjoy just hanging out here.”


Hearing the story, you have to wonder, does the one-time city resident ever long for urban life? “I miss my old friends and the wealth of restaurants Chicago has,” says Connie, seen here. “But I don’t regret coming to live with my mother for one minute. Those were the most important years of my life — they were happy, sad and satisfying all at the same time.”


You also might wonder if Patty and Connie ever talked about the farm’s future. “We never did. But she knew I had committed to the land and that I’d never give up the dogs,” says Connie. “It was just understood — she knew I’d take care of the farm.”

Browse more homes by style:
Small Homes | Colorful Homes | Eclectic Homes | Modern Homes | Contemporary Homes | Midcentury Homes | Ranch Homes | Traditional Homes | Barn Homes | Townhouses | Apartments | Lofts | Vacation Homes

URL: Houzz Tour: Life, Love and Purpose Down on the Farm http://www.decor-ideas.org/cases-view-id-25655.html