When it was time to dig into the hillside for the elevator that would whisk her disabled guests upstairs, Margo McHattie offered a gift of tobacco to Mother Earth and thanked her for allowing the construction.
When folks around Allegan told her the 1836 colonial farmhouse she was renovating was haunted, McHattie climbed to the attic and summoned the ghosts.
“I asked them if we could please coexist here `peacefully,’ ” McHattie said. “And if not, could they please leave.”
There is a spirit at The Painted Lady, a combination art gallery and gourmet restaurant which opened recently on a hill, just south of Allegan.
Its’ McHattie’s.
Her dream is to bring the arts to rural Allegan County. The upper level of this house, formerly the Hubbard House restaurant, is a gallery of rotating art displays. The lower level is a restaurant where the menu changes every two weeks and the chef’s goal is to rival the artists in creativity.
At the heart of it all is McHattie, 37, single mother of two who scurries around the place with her mobile phone on one hip and her portable baby monitor on the other.
Everything has her touch: She insisted the lines on the parking lot be pink. The week before opening day she squinted at the landscaping, an expanse of dirt still under construction, and counted aloud as she decided how many potted mums she’d need.
“Nine, 13, 20,” she mumbled, surveying the entrance. “Oh let’s go for them.”
It’s a dream, after all. Little about it is normal, she conceded. But everything will be cool.
“This side of the state is so starved for art,” said McHattie, who studied art and psychology at the University of Michigan and sketches big drawings of her children in charcoal.
She bought this house and 21 acres behind it last June and has been renovating it ever since. Over the years it has housed several farming families, been a stagecoach stop and, during the lumbering era, was a bunk house for local lumberjacks.
On a day in the week before opening, the place is a frenzy of activity, crawling with plumbers and painters, waitresses and cooks.
A stone mason rummages in the fields for stones to repair the restaurant-level fireplace. An insurance salesman stops by, hoping for business. A prospective customer sticks his head in the door. Could he rent the place next Sunday for, say, 60 people?
The sign isn’t even up yet, but word is spreading that something different is perking in Allegan.
Allegan artist Elaine Harlow’s vivid oil paintings of exotic flowers and seashells lean against the gallery window sill, waiting to be hung. Harlow, 25, dropped off her paintings the other day, saw “total chaos,” she said, and returned in old clothes to pitch in.
“It means so much to have a place like this in Allegan,” Harlow said. “There are so few cultural events here.”
She’s impressed, she said, by McHattie’s long-term vision to turn the rustic barn out back into a community art center: “When a person shows an interest the way she does, we have to seize it.”
McHattie has lived and worked all over the world. Born and raised in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, she got a taste of the arts early, visiting area art centers and cultural events.
She’s worked at museums, peddled paint, sold women’s clothing, worked in parts and service at Ford Motor Co., managed an apartment complex, headed the University of Maryland in Saudi Arabia, done missionary work in Nicaragua.
Divorced a year ago, she and her ex-husband have an amicable relationship as parents of two kids, 3-year-old Maureen Faul and 8-year-old Mac Faul.
That’s why this dream is sprouting in Allegan. While the area needs arts, she said, her kids need their dad, who lives in nearby Paw Paw.
In perhaps the busiest week of her life–barraged constantly by workmen wanting instruction, callers wanting information, staff wanting orders–McHattie keeps a near-constant connection with her blonde, smiling daughter, “Mo.”
She blows her kisses in the middle of conversations, stops everything to caress her wispy hair. The crew here consider Mo and her brother Mac, who lives part-time here and part-time with his dad, part of the team.
Business manager, Christine Morrissett consults with the plumber while making Mo a cup of steamy, frothy milk from the latte machine.
“Here you go, dahling,” Morissett says. Mo, her tiny nails painted coral, grins, and soon sports a milk mustache.
“My baby’s crying for you,” Mo tells her mom, holding up her doll for a hug. Mid-hug, one of McHattie’s prep cooks hobbles in with an injured ankle. Her doctor says she can’t work for at least a few days.
“Don’t worry about it,” McHattie tells her, wrapping her arm around the woman’s shoulder. “Go home and get better. We’ll figure something out.”
Later, a waitress reports she found some black pants for her uniform at Goodwill, but can’t afford the required black shoes.
“Go find some you like and I’ll cut you a check,” McHattie tells her. “You can pay me back a little at a time from your tips.”
“She’s one of the best people I’ve ever worked for,” said custom cabinetmaker Dave Sohlden, working on house restoration here since January. “She wants things done right and if it takes a little longer, it’s worth it to her. She respects what we have to say.”
Chef John Zidarevich tells of curious passersby who have stopped in over the past few months to see what’s going on.
“Margo never told them that we weren’t open yet, or to stop back in September,” he said. “She’d stop what she was doing and give them a tour of the whole place–even her own apartment upstairs–strangers.”
A decade ago when she worked at Ford, McHattie’s co-workers laughed when she insisted they all come to work 10 minutes early to just sit and talk to each other over coffee.
“They called it Mocha with Margo,” she grins. “They ribbed me about it constantly.” But they came.
“I just really love people,” she said. “People are cool.”
A friend strolls in to see how things are going.
“Got all your problems worked out?” he asked her.
“No problems–just challenges,” McHattie told him. “That word is not in my vocabulary.”
While the top level of the house was being turned into a home for McHattie and her kids, there was no bathtub. NO problem. The family bathed in the three-basin sink in the kitchen.
No more of that, now that “Chef John,” as they call him, has turned it into a real kitchen. The enthusiastic 27-year-old chef can’t talk fast enough about his feasts for the eyes and the palate.
The menu will change every two weeks and feature cutting-edge fare, from unusual grains and breads to ostrich.
A Battle Creek native, John Zidarevich went to culinary school in California and worked in San Diego several years before moving back to Michigan with his wife a year ago.
He got a job at the Legend in Grand Rapids, where customers routinely summoned him from the kitchen to tell him his food looked so beautiful it was a shame to disturb it.
Order the Brandy LeChon and your roast pork will arrive stacked in towering layers of meat, petite sweet potato pancakes, sauteed apples and walnuts. Maybe garnished with an edible orchid.
“I want to get Allegan out of its comfort zone,” Zidarevich says, the scent of scampi butter wafting from his kitchen.
Don’t expect to choose between a baked potato or rice pilaf with your meal. Chef John will handpick a side dish for each featured entree. Maybe Asian noodles. Maybe black beans and rice.
Lunch might feature Tuscan mashed potatoes or a Caesar salad with blackened shrimp. Breakfast is continental style, with lots of house-style coffees.
He’ll host occasional ethnic-themed dinners, by invitation only. His grand plan is that food lovers from miles around will clamor to get on the mailing list.
Chef John’s parting words hang in the air with the scent of simmering garlic: “Not much has changed around here since I left in 1987. But it’s going to.”
Upstairs in her office, McHattie mulls what kind of centerpieces will go with the ethnic-inspired chair fabric and unusual peeled wood furniture in the stonewalled dining room.
A Native American dreamcatcher hangs near the window. The beaded, feathered circle of string and leather catches bad dreams and lets the good ones flow through to the other sleepers in the house.
“I’ve had faith that if I build it, they will come,” McHattie said with a smile. She puts the baby monitor to her ear to listen in on Mo’s nap. When she really needs her daughter to take a long rest she looks to the heavens and asks for it.
McHattie strokes a piece of gleaming raku pottery in her gallery as if it were a pet. She has visited nearly every art show in the state looking at work and collecting artists’ business cards.
The gallery’s first viewing will include the paintings and ceramic masks of Katherine Trenshaw, formerly of Kalamazoo and now of Devon, England; jewelry by Becky Thatcher of Glen Arbor; photography by Gene Meadows of Royal Oak; pottery by Julie Devers of Paw Paw; raku by Steve Vachon of Ft. Wayne, Ind.; and paintings by Dov Scher of Ypsilanti and Elaine Harlow.
Storytelling and poetry, by Allegan author, historian and storyteller, Larry Massie, will be a regular feature.
Coffee aficionados can order espresso, latte, cappuccino and other exotic blends.
“I want this place to have a salon-type atmosphere, where artists hang out and people start talking to each other again, instead of just staying home and watching videos,” McHattie said.
“If this isn’t fun, I’m just gonna send everybody home and live in a nice big house with a huge kitchen,” McHattie said. “I really will.”
In a rare peaceful moment, a ladybug skitters across McHattie’s office window, crossing a path of golden sun. The woman who blesses the earth, chats with ghosts and values the lore of Native Americans knows the kind of luck this predicts.
Then, Chef John needs the mobile phone. Carpenter Dave has a question about the stairway trim. The wine distributor is asking about the training for her staff.
And upstairs, Mo is waking from her nap.
