About Us
B&B Owners/Managers - Ron and
Susan Brown
The best way to tell you about Ron and Susan
and the creation of the Bed and Breakfast is
to use Kristy Zurbrick's article published
in the Madison Messenger:
Alexandra's Bed and Breakfast is a dream
realized through hard work for owners Ron
and Susan Brown. Ron, a certified
public accountant, and Susan who worked for
an optometrist in Columbus, decided they we
tired of mowing 22 acres of grass at their
former home. They were ready for the
"city life", they said. They also
needed a place to put the many antiques they
had collected over the years.
They replaced 40 out of the 50 windows in
the house and put in new electric, plumbing
and air conditioning throughout.. They
also added intercoms, fire, and theft
protection systems. Though the
infrastructure has been modernized, the
overall feel of the home remains Victorian.
Susan's sense of design is hard to match;
she decorated all of the home's 25
rooms, including its bedrooms and 7
bathrooms.
Upon entering Alexandra's, one is confronted
with a variety of choices. They can go
to the left, into the library, which serves
as Ron's formal business office. They
can go forward though the hallway toward the
dinning room, or up the stairs leading to
the second and third stories. To the
right is the parlor, featuring a grand
fireplace and many antiques, including a
writing desk form 1875.
"The floor in the parlor was a special find,
"Susan said. "One day while we were
working, a woman who was walking by stopped
in and asked to look at the floor. I
wasn't sure what to say, but I did let her
in.. That's when we found out that
underneath the carpet there was a
basket-weave parquets floor in great
condition." Another find in the
parlor was the original crown moldings,
which was revealed when a drop ceiling was
removed.
While the interior of the home was Susan's
place to exercise her creativity, the
exterior was Ron's. He spent two
months on scaffolding to return the soffit
and box gutters to their original;
condition. He spent time
tuck-pointing the bricks to fill in
gaps that had widened over the decades.
He also had the pleasure of removing 130
years of paint from the porch's pillars.
"This is a great place to come to get away
from it all, and we hope many people take
advantage of it," Ron Said. "We are
all busy. We want this to be the place
everyone can leave that life behind, if just
for a little while, and go back to a time
when things weren't so rushed."
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