Selling Hospitality

Every morning at 7 a.m., there are always coffee, tea and sweet breakfast cakes waiting on the table at 2 Seafield Lane in Westhampton Beach, whether Elsie Collins is entertaining or not.

It is a hard habit to break. For more than three decades, her home has doubled as the 1880 House Bed & Breakfast. But it may not for much longer.

Just before Memorial Day, 79-year-old Ms. Collins put the 19th century house and its three suites, chock-full with antique furniture and mementos, on the market for just over $1 million—a considerable amount more than the $75,000 she bought it for in the 1970s.

“I’ve done the bed and breakfast for about 35 years,” Ms. Collins said, taking a sip of tea during an interview at her home last week. “Before that, I taught kindergarten. I took a job in Bellport where the teacher before me had a nervous breakdown. That can easily happen if you don’t know the techniques of dealing with small children. That’s very similar to doing the bed and breakfast. And you have to love to deal with people. I love it when they come in the door and you go, ‘Oh, how am I going to make this person happy?’ But you have to realize, we’re all getting older.”

Ms. Collins is not alone in her desire to move on and out of her B&B. South Winds Guest House—Westhampton Beach’s second, and only other, bed and breakfast—on Potunk Lane is also up for sale by its stewards, Randy and Rosemary Dean.

By definition, a true B&B is an owner-occupied home with five or fewer bedrooms, Ms. Dean explained.

“If it doesn’t stay as a bed and breakfast, I think the village would be missing a wonderful opportunity,” she said of her house, as she sat on a couch next to her husband at their home and place of business, South Winds, last week. “I know our clients are very sad. I have people penciled in for the summer and the phone’s ringing for destination weddings. If we sell and Elsie sells, there’s nowhere for them to stay—no bed and breakfasts, anyway.”

While Ms. Collins said she is in no rush, the Deans are ready to move on to the next chapter of their lives, they said. Two years ago, they listed South Winds at its appraised $2.25-million price tag. But given the state of the economy, that was a mistake, they said. The couple is now asking just under $1.4 million.

“It’s discouraging, but we try to stay optimistic,” Ms. Dean said. “We know we have a beautiful house and somebody’s going to come in and fall in love with it the way we did.”

The couple had dreamed of owning their own B&B ever since traveling around Europe in 1980 “with no two pennies to rub together,” Ms. Dean said. In Holland, they slept in a fisherman’s cottage. In Germany, they stayed in a 1,000-year-old castle and a zimmer frei, or bed and breakfast, that overlooked the 1936 Olympic ski jump, Mr. Dean said.

“We thought they were so charming and thought, ‘This is a great career for when we get older and the kids are out,’ so that was always in our mind to do,” Ms. Dean said. “Randy took a drive out here one day and saw this house and just said, ‘That’s the house we want.’”

To say it was rundown would be an understatement. All three of the home’s porches were on the ground. The windows couldn’t shut due to rot. The walls were filled with mildew and holes littered the roof.

That didn’t stop the Deans. In 2000, they closed for $600,000 and invested $400,000 in renovations, Mr. Dean said.

“But now we’re retiring,” the 65-year-old reported. “I retired from the Long Island Railroad after 25 years. This became a second career for me and, so, 13 years, 12 years is enough.”

“If we’re here this summer, it’ll be our 13th summer,” Ms. Dean, 64, added. “But now we have grandchildren and they’re in Brooklyn. And we want to travel while we’re still healthy enough to do all those kinds of things.”

“We want to be able to carry our own suitcases,” Mr. Dean laughed.

“It turned out to be a wonderful career, a wonderful opportunity to meet people,” his wife said. “We were so much busier than we ever thought we would be. It opened up the world and made me want to travel more. We just hope this is gonna be the winter we sell.”

If they do, the Deans plan on moving west while staying on Long Island, they said.

But Ms. Collins has other plans.

“I always leave options open for myself,” she said. “If I don’t sell the house, I’ll do the bed and breakfast. It doesn’t matter. You can’t get yourself into a bind. But I do have a place in Kingston my father left me. It’s two acres of land and I would love to do permafarming on that two acres of land.”

At shortly before 11 a.m. Ms. Collins cleared the dishes from the table and walked into the kitchen.

“It would be a change,” she said. “Here, you give the customer what he wants, what she wants, not what you think they should want. And then you have the person who comes and they’re very upset with life, especially today, and they just want you to sit and listen. And I can do that.”

She chuckled. “Very nicely.”