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BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY: New owners maintain 'Friendliest Place' honor

Team Tiffany: Craig, Karen and Lauren make up the kitchen and serving crew at the Bed & Breakfast on Tiffany Hill.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 27, 2024

MILLS RIVER — An opera singer and a piano player walk into a country inn in Saint Remy, France, and fall in love. Not with each other. Old news. Happened 20 years ago in graduate school in Cincinnati.

This love was the pursuit of a daring new chapter: owning a bed and breakfast of their own.

For Craig Verm, a renowned baritone who performs operas across the U.S. and the world, and Karen Verm, an accompanist and vocal coach with three graduate degrees in music, the stars aligned in an elegantly clear pattern.

Daughter Lauren, a precocious 14-year-old, picks up the narrative while her parents slice fruit, fix sun-dried tomato and basil frittata and bake a parmesan scone and mandarin orange cake in the kitchen.

“My dad’s a very friendly and outgoing person, and my mom loves to cook and she loves to bake and put together designs,” Lauren says, “so it’s always been a ‘joke dream.’”

Until it wasn’t.

“And then last year, we went on a trip to Europe — nine countries — and we stayed at a bunch of bed and breakfasts and I think the entire time my mom was like, ‘Oh, we should just move to Ireland and buy a bed and breakfast, get a bunch of sheep and have chickens.’ And then they saw Tiffany Hill and they started talking about it and then here we are. My mom, I think, is the happiest she’s ever been.”

Among ‘Friendliest Places in the South’

As it turned out, as Karen was imaging sheep and chickens, Selena Einwechter had put her award-winning inn, the Bed & Breakfast on Tiffany Hill in Mills River, on the market.

Since the couple closed on the purchase in March, they’ve done nothing to diminish the reputation of Tiffany Hill as one of “20 Friendliest Places in the South,” as a Southern Living feature deemed it.

If Karen is on a happy cloud like no other, it’s clear that the whole family is in exuberant harmony with their destiny. Maybe it comes from bringing joy to large audiences through their music, or from Karen’s mom’s love of baking, or from their preternatural sociability —all those things probably — but guests at Tiffany Hill bask in the relaxing presence of innkeepers who genuinely love what they’re doing.

“For most of our marriage, we’ve always rented a room out to a student or a friend, somebody that we have vetted,” Craig says as the couple shows me around the inn. “But we’ve always had our home open to someone else. Someone else has always been at our table. We love cooking together and hosting people, and now it’s just bigger.”

Karen adds more meant-to-be’s.

“When I was looking to get out of academia this seemed like the right choice,” she says. “We have this kind of strange accumulation of gifts between us, with cooking and Craig’s handyman skills and music, and this is right where Craig’s family is. All the pieces fell together. We were just really excited to be here.”

Craig’s parents and a brother live in Asheville, so Craig and Karen have nieces and nephews and Lauren has cousins and grandparents.

“We’ve been coming here for 20 years, several times a year, to visit, and I taught at the Brevard Music Festival in 2015 and ‘16,” Karen says. “So even when I moved down here, it didn’t feel like we were uprooting and starting brand new.”

Love is in the aria

Craig Verm sings for B&B guests as Karen Verm accompanies.Karen Roethlisberger and Craig Verm met at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she was pursuing her three graduate degrees and he was earning his master’s in music.  

Although Karen was Craig’s accompanist, she says it wasn’t love at first overture.

“It took me a year and a half to date him,” she says.

A cum laude graduate of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Craig is in demand from metro operas across the U.S. and in Europe.

“Mr. Verm is possessed of one of the finest, most mellifluous baritones of his generation.” Opera Today raved.

“As Don Giovanni...Craig Verm stepped into the leading role with authority, fine voice, charisma… and a damned sexy mien,” Dallas Voice gushed when, elevated from understudy to the lead role, Craig wowed Dallas Opera patrons. (He reprises the Don Giovanni role for Opera Omaha in the fall and understudies the role of Papageno in the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of the “The Magic Flute” next spring.)

Karen has accompanied singers across the U.S. and worked widely as a vocal coach. The couple maintains a partnership that Tiffany Hill had already formed with Brevard Music Center. Karen played five preview concerts for BMC last month. And in their current day job, they surprise and delight guests when Craig sings a pop or classic tune while Karen accompanies on piano.

Jack Roethlisberger, Karen's dad, is an expert aircraft builder and restorer of classic cars and trucks.If the couple has star power on stage, they show nothing but humor and level-headedness at home. Craig points out a broken bathtub faucet that is “a work in progress.” When he’s not an opera star, he’s a handyman.

“Her father taught me plumbing, electric, carpentry, car mechanics, bodywork,” Craig says. “He can do anything. He’s a mechanical genius and an artist.”

Jack Roethlisberger is no ordinary tinkerer.

“He became a pilot and then he started building airplanes,” Karen says. “His specialty was PT-27 Stearman biplanes. People sought him out worldwide to build them. He’s just one of those people who understands how things are put together.”

Jack and his wife, Sandy, were staying at Tiffany Hill when we visited recently. Back home in Pittsburgh, her dad still works on whatever his freshest interest is, in one of his four airplane hangars or four garage bays. His latest restoration masterwork is a red 1955 Ford pickup.

Engaging the community

When they lived in Houston — “loved the job, hated the weather,” Craig says — the couple invited several hundred people to their home from a soup fundraiser for a homeless shelter. Guests were told to bring their own bowl and spoon — no dishes to wash. They’re eager to engage the community here, too.

On Sept. 19, they’re hosting a “Freedom Dinner” for a nonprofit that combats human trafficking. “We’re doing half of it,” he says. “The other half is volunteers donating their talents — their flowers or their calligraphy or cooking or serving or cleaning.”

“We really want to not just be a place where outsiders come but we want to foster a sense of community here as well,” he says. “We’d like to bring local people in for good causes.”

Clearly, the “joke dream” is, well, no joke.