By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
CARIBOU — While The Old Iron Inn is advancing in years, Caribou’s only bed and breakfast has yet to show any signs of rust as owners Kevin and Kate McCartney celebrate 20 years of serving a loyal and friendly clientele.
Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet
The living room of The Old Iron Inn is filled with the bed and breakfast’s iconic display of old irons, collected by Kevin McCartney, at right. Kevin and his wife, Kate, are celebrating twenty years of business in 2012, a milestone anniversary resultant of the pair’s unparalleled hospitality.
Two decades is well over a lifetime in bed and breakfast years, and it was only through hard work and perseverance that the McCartney’s were able to build up their business, particularly since they didn’t quite have an abundance of furniture when they first opened the inn’s doors in 1992.
“We started with nothing,” Kevin explained. “We’d moved from a one bedroom apartment into this [four bedroom] house and, for the first month or so, if we did have a guest, they slept in the room with the furniture in it.”
Twenty years later, a walk through the B&B illuminates a wonderfully eclectic décor, filled with (as their name suggests) old irons, antique furniture and a richly unique ambiance.
As the couple explained, the atmosphere of a bed and breakfast is drastically different than that of a motel, and their clientele tends to follow suite.
“A bed and breakfast is an acquired taste,” Kevin explained. Both Kevin and Kate were quick to explain that there’s nothing wrong with motels — merely bed and breakfasts offer a much different experience.
For instance, The Old Iron Inn has fourteen different libraries but only one television that guests share in a common upstairs living room. Discussion between the travelers and their hosts tend to have a more cerebral focus — one facet of the bed and breakfast experience repeat customers have come to expect — and that discussion is often abundantly shared around the breakfast table.
As much of the inn’s customers are travelers, rather than tourists, Kate makes certain every morning that guests start the day with an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables — something the guests have raved about.
“My main focus when I’m preparing breakfast is to make sure that there are at least three to five servings of fresh fruits and vegetables,” she said, adding that she can empathize with the difficulty of trying to eat healthy on the road.
Kale and carrots aside, Kate’s cooking is as delicious as it is healthy.
“Kate makes the best waffles you will ever taste,” Kevin raved.
Owning a successful bed and breakfast is more of a lifestyle than an entrepreneurial endeavor, as Kate labors daily to ensure that the inn’s guests are properly tended to. That includes daily chores like scrubbing the house from top to bottom, baking fresh confectionary treats and breads and attending to the little details that ensure the inn’s customers come back time and time again — “little” things like ironing the sheets and making sure the television room is stocked with bottled water and an assortment of teas and coffee.
While Kate tends to the daily inn activities, Kevin’s influence on the bed and breakfast is prominently reflected through the collection of items that contribute to the atmosphere of the inn; over the years, Kevin’s accumulated collections of antique irons (hence the B&B’s name), phonographs, antique furniture and books, among other items.
Pieces of his collections are decoratively strewn around the house, but perhaps nothing more attention drawing than the collections of books.
“If you travel around the house, there are bookcases everywhere,” Kevin explained. “There’s an Abraham Lincoln Library upstairs, there’s an aviation library in the basement — we collect books and they just gather.”
As Kevin holds a doctorate in Geology and Kate a master’s degree in literature, the books they’ve colleted span genres; guests are encouraged to peruse the libraries and thumb through any books they find particularly interesting. The couple has even been known even lend out a book or two so their loyal travelers can finish their reading.
While breakfast is always fresh and delicious at The Old Iron Inn (to the extent that Kate’s authored two cook books), breakfast only fills half the quota of a Bed and Breakfast; the inn features four fabulously decorated rooms, three of which include a private bathroom.
As would be expected of two hosts with an interest in all things, the rooms of The Old Iron Inn have been meticulously decorated in keeping with their own particular theme; there’s The Old Iron Room, The Rose Room and The Lincoln Room — the décor of which is quite logically paired with the name — and then there’s The Amoeba Room.
Both Kevin and Kate chuckled as they explained how The Amoeba Room came about its name.
“We always say that it’s the only bed and breakfast room in the United Stats named after a microorganism,” Kate said.
When Kevin and Kate bought the home in 1992, what is now The Amoeba Room was then just a room covered with hideous wallpaper.
“The original wallpaper was these big blobs of color with these big spiky things coming out of them — which I’m sure were all the rage in the 1950s,” Kate joked.
As the two set to work removing the color-blob wallpaper and replacing it with a less sensational print, they nicknamed their worksite “The Amoeba Room” and, much to their decorative dismay, the name stuck.
After all, it’s not easy to decorate a room highlighting microbiology.
The couple, however, flawlessly pulled it off with beautiful framed amoeba prints and even microscope lamps.
While owning a bed and breakfast means often putting in 16 hour days, seven days a week for months at a time, The Old Iron Inn has become an integral part of their lives.
Loyal, repeat customers have not only supported the bed and breakfast through these past 20 years, they’ve become friends for Kevin and Kate.
“That’s the golden part of what we do,” Kate said, “these people become our friends.”
