ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 3, 1996 TAG: 9609040038
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
THE CENTURY-OLD yellow house has been converted by owners Margaret and Tom Ray into a four-diamond bed and breakfast.
At The Oaks Victorian Inn, the proprietor pampers guests with peaches and sherry. Those touches are attracting the notice of lodging analysts, executives and publishers.
The most recent was being pictured on the cover of a new 500-page lodging guidebook from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The trust is a nonprofit chartered by Congress to encourage preservation of American historical buildings, sites and artifacts.
Amanda Miller, who edited the preservation society guidebook, said The Oaks got cover treatment because the old yellow house epitomized the classic American historic inn in one photographic frame.
"I was just really struck by the sheer beauty of their bed and breakfast," said Miller, a senior editor at John Wiley & Sons Inc., a New York publishing house. The Oaks paid $95 to be one of the 700 listed establishments in the book but nothing extra for the cover.
This area's inns also had a leg up for winning the cover shot - editor Miller admits a pro-Western Virginia bias. She's a 1986 graduate of Hollins College in Roanoke.
The release of 10,000 copies of the guidebook came only a few months after the American Automobile Association awarded The Oaks a four-diamond rating on its five-point scale. The "excellent" rating - the same grade given the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center - replaced the inn's former three-diamond rating in the current AAA TourBook's Mid-Atlantic edition.
Owners Margaret and Tom Ray weren't professional innkeepers when they bought the property in 1991. She was a public relations and marketing consultant and he an architect.
They lived in Vienna in Northern Virginia and made good money. But to avoid the risk of being downsized out of work in their 50s, they quit their jobs and searched for something with long-term potential. They learned that bed and breakfast operators were multiplying in number and generally outperforming the hotel business as a whole.
The Oaks was a 100-year-old private home in need of repair when they bought it. They said they have since invested heavily of their time and money - declining to say how much - restoring it and nurturing the enterprise, which she describes as a "wonderful little business."
They live there, they perform many of the renovations and they staff their business, getting help from one full-time and two part-time employees who do housekeeping and other chores.
This is an operating strategy that has worked for other small innkeepers and some say is the only one that works.
The most successful of the 400 bed and breakfast-style inns in the state are run by proprietors who blend operation of the business into their lifestyle, said Pete Holladay, an innkeeper in Orange who is president of the Virginia Bed and Breakfast Association.
Running one of these is more than a full-time job. "A 100-year old house breaks every day," Margaret Ray said. They are reroofing this month and plan a few small repairs to the immaculate interior. It's time well spent, they believe.
"You have to be better than you were last year in this business just to stay even," she said.
A second key to success, Holladay said, is to market wide and far. "If you're surviving, you're doing good marketing," he said.
The Rays said they know this well. In an interview, she disappears from the parlor and returns with a 4-inch stack of magazines and other publications that mention them. The inn is featured in a television program, Inn Country USA, seen on the Travel Channel, they said.
The inn has five large rooms with private baths, microwaves and refrigerators, including two tucked away on the third floor, well removed for undisturbed reading or sleeping. Common living areas offer a place to talk and relax among antique furniture and collections of books, china and elephant-shaped figurines and accessories. In one parlor, guests help themselves to a silver bowl of peaches and decanter of sherry. At breakfast, they sit down to rum raisin French toast.
The Rays said they get heavy repeat business from chief executives and other management-level guests in the area on business, who make up half their weekday clientele, with the rest being leisure travelers.
A room rents for $115 to $140 for one or two people and includes breakfast. Business travelers staying alone pay $85 during the week.
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: GENE DALTON/Staff. The Oaks Victorian Inn, located inby CNBChristiansburg, has an American Automobile Association rating that
equals the Hotel Roanoke's. Its owners say it's a "wonderful little
business." color.