HOMESPIRATION
STORY CHRIS CHRISTEN PHOTOGRAPHY KURT A. KEELER
We're on one
of our wandering weekend drives when a little directional sign, partially hidden in roadside grasses, catches our eye on the outskirts of Malvern, Iowa. Intrigued, we leave the paved highway and zigzag along a country road to our unplanned destination: Pierce Crossing, a country-fresh guesthouse on aptly named Little Lane about a mile southwest of town. It’s love at first sight. My husband and I are equally smitten by the pristine clapboard exterior, complete with geranium-filled window boxes and gingerbread accents. Now, if we can just peek inside. We have a chance, we figure, if the fella in the red pickup truck trailing us owns the property. And appreciates unannounced visitors. With notepads and cameras. Greg Pierce gives us a cheerful welcome. “We were going to tear down the house when we bought the acreage in 1999,” he offers as he unlocks the door, relieved that we’re not an overnight reservation that slipped through the cracks. An out-of-town sister talked Greg and his wife, Bonnie, into renovating the house as a place for her to stay. “But she’s never used it,” Greg says with a chuckle. Instead, the Pierces turned the farmhouse into a B&B with a twist. “It’s a bed and bring-your-own bagel,” Greg quips. “We don’t serve breakfast but we do provide a fully equipped kitchen.” The Pierces, who live in a new home nearby, have been welcoming guests since 2001. “It was a wreck,” Greg recalls of the renovation project he largely took on himself. “We had an old house in town that I had remodeled three times, so I got pretty handy” at carpentry, he explains. Chatting, we learn that he's a Vietnam vet and former Northwestern Bell employee. He jokes that he's been retired so long that everything he worked on during his career is obsolete. Not the contents of the guesthouse. Everything old is new again. “People say the decor reminds them of Grandma’s house or Aunt Bessie’s house.”
32 SEPTEMBER/OC TOBER 2017