Category: St. Clair Living

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Latest entertaining trend
going strong in St. Clair County

Story by Mike Bolton
Photos by Jerry Martin

Turn on the DIY Network or HGTV, and you don’t have to watch very long before you’ll see another outdoor kitchen under construction. A number of homeowners are now skipping the patios and decks that have long been a staple of home ownership in favor of elaborate outdoor kitchens designed to entertain family and friends.

That trend hasn’t bypassed St. Clair County. All across the county, builders are adding outdoor kitchens to the backyards of homes. Backyard tailgating has become the rage with many outdoor kitchens, hosting dozens of guests as college football teams play on television on Saturdays.

When Kenny St. John told his wife Jamie a decade ago about his dreams of building an outdoor kitchen, the fad was fairly new. She said she couldn’t even picture what he was talking about.

Today she is a fan. Their beautiful cedar-clad, outdoor pavilion in Springville gets used for everything year-round, she says.

“Kenny has a vision for things that I don’t have,” she said. “I didn’t realize just how much we would get out of it.”

Their facility has anything anyone could ask for. It overlooks a beautiful pond where Canada geese swim as white-tailed deer frolic nearby. In the background is towering Straight Mountain.

Their outdoor living pavilion includes a 55-inch big screen television and a sitting area where visitors can take in football games on Saturdays, Sundays and Monday nights. The cooking area has a Big Green Egg, a smoker, a gas grill and a cook top stove.

There is also a meadow where their kids and visitor’s kids can play football, an enormous outdoors fireplace with its own television and a large hot tub. Visitors can also fish for catfish in the pond if they like.

“This is where I live,” Kenny St. John said as he lounged in the outdoor kitchen with an NFL pre-season game playing on the big screen television. “I stay out here all the time.

“I always wanted something like this growing up. We use it year-round. We have the fireplace and propane heaters that will keep you warm late in the football season when the weather gets cold.”

The St. Johns’ backyard kitchen has understandably become the spot to be on football Saturdays and for family gatherings.

“I have six brothers and sisters and my mother lives in a garden home so we have the only place really big enough to have everyone on Thanksgiving,” Jamie St. John said. “We had my nephew’s rehearsal dinner here. A few weeks ago we had 75 people out here for my daughter’s birthday party.”

The entertaining is nice, but what would an outdoor kitchen be without food? Kenny St. John is the master chef for all events with his wife handling all the non-meat items. He cooks turkeys and hams for Thanksgiving, but it’s his barbecue, steaks and fish fries that draw rave reviews throughout football season.

“We cook a lot of pork butts and ribs,” he said. “My wife makes potato salad, fried green tomatoes and a lot of Rotel dip and a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”

If it’s a sport it gets watched at the St. John outdoor kitchen. There’s NASCAR, drag racing and NFL football, but it all hinges around college football on Saturdays. The St. Johns are big Alabama fans and most parties revolve around watching Crimson Tide games.

“We watch everything, including Wheel of Fortune, out here, but college football is what we live for,” Jamie St. John said.

Living in such a rural area does have its advantages for really rabid football fans, the husband and wife team agreed.

“We have a cannon that we fire every time Alabama scores a touchdown,” Kenny St. John said. “One of our neighbors said he doesn’t even have to watch the game because he knows every time Alabama scores.”

If you’re wondering why in the world someone with a 7,000-square-foot home would need an outdoor kitchen, you obviously haven’t seen the view from Johnny Grimes’ Pell City backyard. And besides, who wants 100 people milling around inside their home no matter how big it is?

Grimes’ outdoor kitchen, which overlooks Lake Logan Martin and Stemley Bridge, is headquarters for many Pell City area Auburn fans on football Saturdays. A crowd of 75 people on game day is not that unusual, and the record stands at 105. Crowds are so big in fact that those who arrive by vehicle must park in a designated area away from his home, and they are brought to the party in a 15-passenger van. Some choose to arrive via the Coosa River and park their boats in Grimes’ covered slips on the water.

Once there, visitors can watch Auburn on one of two big screen televisions at the lavish cypress bar in the outdoor kitchen, or they can listen to the game as they lounge around the 52-foot saltwater pool, which has a walk-in beach. The pool is surrounded by immaculately manicured gardens and fed by a waterfall.

Grimes, who owns Johnny’s Electric in Pell City, is the chef and he prepares ribs, chickens, hamburgers, steaks and crawfish boils from his $6,500 Viking gas grill that is located just feet from the 10-seat bar. The outdoor kitchen also has a freezer, refrigerator and deep fryer.

An air-conditioned and heated bathroom is located just off the flagstone patio of the kitchen.

“This keeps all the mess outside,” Grimes said. “We cook the main dishes in the outdoor kitchen, and the breads and all the sides are cooked in the house.

“People just feel more comfortable and enjoy being outdoors on game day. They can whoop and holler and mingle, and it is a lot more pleasant for them to be out here. I built this kitchen five years ago, and everyone just loves it.”

Fourth of July celebrations were huge at Don Farmer’s home when he was a boy growing up in Springville. Literally hundreds of people would show up over a two-day period to eat barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.

“I was born on July 3 so for the longest time as a kid I thought everybody was coming to my birthday party,” Farmer said with a laugh. “With my dad now gone, I now have great memories of all those family members and friends coming to our house like that.”

Farmer says it is those memories that spurred the building of his outdoor kitchen. He says it was a project that started out small, but he admits that it kept growing until it turned into a monster.

Farmer’s outdoor facility atop Simmons Mountain is indeed monstrous. The L-shaped structure is 30 feet by 40 feet on one side and has the same dimensions on the other. It is complemented with a swimming pool and a hot tub that seats 10 people.

It features beautiful brickwork arches and stamped concrete floors and countertops. A big-screen television is the focal point every Saturday during football season. The double pavilion is designed to entertain a lot of people and it does that whenever Alabama is playing on television.

“For some of the bigger games like Tennessee, it’s nothing to have 80 people here,” Farmer said. “We’ve had people we don’t know just be driving by and stop. They just say they see all the cars on Saturdays and wonder what is going on.”

Farmer is an excavator by trade. He says no engineers were involved in the massive project, and no plans were ever put on paper. He said it was “just all in my head. It all began when my granddaughter Chassidy said she wanted a swimming pool,” Farmer said. “I told her Nana would run down to Wal-Mart and get her one. She came inside a little while later and said she didn’t want that kind of pool. She said she wanted one in the ground.

“I started digging the next week.”

Farmer first built the pool and then decided to add a pavilion on the side so his mother and mother-in-law could get out of the sun. It would also serve as an area under the cover so he could grill.

“That was okay but my wife decided she wanted to enclose it and make it part of the house,” he said. “I decided I was going to have me a place where I could cook.

“My wife said if I would build it that she would take care of it. I got it in my mind what I wanted but I didn’t realize how big it was going to be until we actually started building it. It has about become a full-time job for my wife to take care of it now.”

Farmer says he did some research and got some very good advice early. “Somebody said don’t put anything into the construction of an outdoor kitchen that didn’t come from the earth. It’s almost all stone, brick and concrete – even the walls. The only wood in it are the gable ends and the exposed beams.”

Farmer loves kids, and he didn’t want a place where kids weren’t welcome. He says he made everything “kid friendly.” There is a playhouse, and parents can watch their kids in the pool and the hot tub from the raised kitchen that looks down on both.

The rules to attend a get-together at the Farmer’s outdoor kitchen are simple. You can bring a dish if you like, but Farmer and his son Heath provide the meat and do the cooking. Boston butts, pork ribs, different sausages and steaks are their specialty. The kitchen has a smoker, a broiler, a griddle, a stovetop, a grill and a barbecue pit.

When the weather cools late in the season, a fireplace keeps the area warm. Blinds can be lowered to keep everything cozy.

“We’ve had 140 people here on July 3 and about 80 the next day,” Farmer’s wife, Deniase, said. “We just stay up all night and celebrate Don’s birthday and July 4th.”

Farmer says his goals in building an outdoor kitchen were simple even though the final outcome was not.

“I wanted a place that would keep the foot traffic out of the house,” he said. “I wanted a place where somebody could spill a drink or drop a meatball on the floor, and it wasn’t a big deal.”

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Living in a work of art

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Jerry Martin

Jimmie Nell Miller is an artist and former interior decorator who likes to go to open houses and read Architectural Digest for the eye candy. But the Pell City home she shares with husband, Ray, is like eye candy to visitors, because its wide hallways, huge bathrooms and very modern kitchen are filled with Jimmie Nell’s colorful artwork. From tulips to Tuscany, cornices to credenzas, every inch of the Country French chateau reflects Jimmie Nell’s personality and her love for entertaining family and friends.

“It’s like an art gallery in here,” Jimmie Nell admits.

Atlanta architect Frank Jova designed this “art gallery,” which the Millers first spotted as a Southern Living Idea House in Chateau Elan outside of Atlanta in 1994. Jimmie Nell fell in love with its French influence, while Ray liked the way it flowed. Both appreciated the roominess of its 5,000 square feet, which may seem superfluous for two people. But Jimmie Nell says they use every square foot of it. “We entertain lots of functions, and have lots of family visits,” she says. “We live in the whole house.”

Built on a former dairy farm, the house is awash with European influences. Its wide hallways represent streets of old Europe, for example, and the extra depth of the tray ceiling in the entry hall is painted blue to keep the ghosts away. “It’s supposed to fool them into thinking it’s daytime,” Jimmie Nell explains.

The gallery tour begins in this entrance hall, where Jimmie Nell’s acrylic painting of Glen Coe, Scotland, one of seven inspired by her trip to that country earlier this year, rests on a stand. Her oil paintings of lemon trees flank the front door, along with sculptured fruits made of composite materials resembling stone, which she purchased.

Turning right, you come face-to-face with sunflowers and peppers in a red vase, done in oils, while the butler’s pantry features another oil painting of a rooster in bright plumage of blue, gold and red.

Kitchen cabinets are made of cherry, countertops are granite, and the appliances are Bosch and Kitchen Aid. The refrigerator is disguised as a tall cabinet, and an appliance garage hides the toaster, mixer and electric can opener. Bunnies nibble cabbage from a ceramic pot on the wall behind the gas range, thanks to Jimmie Nell’s ingenuity. She painted the tiles, then installed them herself because she didn’t trust the tile man to get the ears on the bunnies right.

“I designed my kitchen because I wanted the cabinets to look like little pieces of furniture,” Jimmie Nell says. “My cabinet maker said he’d build them that way, but he didn’t think I would like them. When he finished, he liked them, too.”

Pell City artist John Lonergan did the portrait of Ray, their son Adam when he was 12, and Adam’s dog that hangs over the fireplace in the den. That portrait and the 106-year-old watercolor duo by Ray’s great-grandmother that hang in the music room are among the handful of artwork in the house that weren’t done by Jimmie Nell.

She has a glass table with eight upholstered chairs in her formal dining room, which she uses a lot. Her china cabinet, housed behind mahogany doors, holds Noritake china, cut-glass and redneck wine glasses (small Mason jars on stems). Jimmie Nell’s favorite piece of furniture is in this dining room, and it, too, features some of her artwork. It’s a bar made of two separate pieces that probably weren’t originally meant to be together. The bottom portion is a mahogany cabinet, while the top is a pine hutch with stained-glass tulips and a center canvas on which Jimmie Nell painted more tulips before installing it between the glass panels. “We bought this from an antiques dealer who used to be in St. Clair Springs,” she says. “We had it in our house before we moved here.”

Another painting of tulips, this one in acrylics, hangs between the dining room and music room, because “tulips are easy to paint,” says Jimmie Nell. She has had the room’s baby grand piano more than 40 years and believes it was built in the 1930s. While neither she nor Ray play piano, their two daughters, one son-in-law and a granddaughter do. Nevertheless, the music room happens to be her favorite, the place where she loves to curl up with a good book or take a nap.

From the screened porch off the dining room, the sound of ceiling fans overhead and an Italian bronze garden fountain outside soothe the soul. The peaceful garden features knock-out roses, daylilies, limelight hydrangeas, magnolias and blue point juniper spirals. Both Ray and Jimmie Nell work in the garden, but Ray, a retired banker, trims the 10-year-old topiaries himself.

Back indoors, the art tour continues down the hall from the entryway into the powder room, where Jimmie Nell has an old credenza on which she depicted parrots, monkeys and a leopard “back when jungle themes were so popular.” Nearby is the media room, where a 72-inch wide-screen TV is set into a niche in one wall. Movie posters of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood adorn other walls and a bronze replica of Remington’s Mountain Man dominates the center. Two leather couches and four mission-style gliding rockers with fake-leather bottom cushions and Southwestern-print back cushions provide ample seating. Jimmie Nell made the glider’s back cushions and the room’s matching cornices herself. The media room happens to be Ray’s favorite in the house, a place where he keeps up with the news and email via television and computer.

The master bedroom is near the media room and features another tray ceiling, a portrait of Jimmie Nell done in 1986 by Pell City artist Evelyn Whatley, and a huge bathroom with his-and-hers sinks and vanities on opposite sides of the room. The vanities are separated by a glass-enclosed shower, and Ray and Jimmie Nell have separate closets, too. More of Jimmie Nell’s artwork is featured in a buffet from her old dining room suite that has panels she painted with shell designs.

Upstairs are two guest bedrooms, one with a 100-year-old washstand on which Jimmie Nell painted a Colonial couple at a fence, and a doll house made from a kit one of her daughters gave her 20 years ago. An open balcony connects the two bedrooms and overlooks the dining room on one side, with a glass-less window overlooking the entry hall on the other.

In the second upstairs bedroom Jimmie Nell used French toile for the bed’s coronet and a chair skirt, but a nautically-themed fabric on the bed pillows and valance.

After 12 years in the house, the Millers still find it very livable. “We like the way it flows,” says Ray. Jimmie Nell agrees. “I like the roominess of it, and the private areas where we can get away from each other,” she says, with a wink. “That has probably saved our marriage.”

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Lusitanos, Arabians find home in St. Clair

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Jerry Martin

From the deserts of ancient Arabia and the bullfighting rings of Portugal, two distinctly different yet equally majestic horse breeds have made their way to St. Clair County. World-class Arabians prance and play at Don Olvey’s Aradon Farm in Odenville, while purebred Lusitanos strut and cavort at Robert and Carolyn Crum’s Shangrila Farm in Gallant.

The owners of both farms started their breeding programs for the same reason: They fell in love with a breed. Olvey’s passion started with a day at a friend’s barn, while the Crums began by admiring an exhibition horse. In each case, a spark was ignited instantly, and their encounters changed the course of their lives.

“I had a friend in the Arabian horse business, and he had an Open Barn with food and tours and invited me to come out,” says Olvey, 76, who rode American Quarter Horses as a child. “I saw these beautiful Arabians, a breed I had never seen before. I decided then and there to get into raising them.”

Olvey bought his first Arabian in 1985 while living in Hoover. He built a barn on his stepfather’s farm in Tuscaloosa County, where he kept his horses until he could find a place of his own. He considers his discovery of the land that was to become Aradon Farm as something magical.

“I wasn’t familiar with this side of town,” he says of Odenville. “I went to Pell City one day, looked on a map and saw Highway 174. I thought I would ride through there on my way home. Through the trees I saw this beautiful pasture, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, would I love to have that.’ I drove another block, and saw a for-sale sign. I called the Realtor immediately and signed the contract that day. It was just what I wanted.”

That first horse Olvey purchased was a stallion, because “every man thinks he wants a stallion,” he says. Then he bought four mares out of Missouri and had them shipped to Alabama. He did a lot of research to learn the industry, studying national Arabian horse publications to get familiar with the bloodlines. “Even in the Arabian breed, there are several different bloodlines,” says Olvey. “You’ve got the Egyptian strain, the Polish, the Russian, the Spanish, and the American strain — called domestic because we’ve taken all those others and blended them together.”

Although his original horses were either sold or died, they gave Olvey his start toward becoming one of the largest Arabian breeders in the Southeast. He has two domestic Arabian stallions, both of them champions. Giaccomo was a Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show Champion 2-year-old colt, a U.S. National Top Ten Yearling Colt and a Region 15 Champion Stallion. PS Andiamo is a U.S. and Canada Top Ten Stallion. Both were sired by Marwan Al Shaquab, who is “the hottest thing in the (Arabian) breeds right now,” according to Olvey.

His two stallions and 12 broodmares produce six to 10 foals per year, which are weaned at four months and sell for $5,000 to $80,000 each. He also breeds to other people’s stallions, and ships semen from his own stallions to other breeders for a $2,500 stud fee. He has eight babies due next year. “We breed for halter horses, and that’s what we mainly show,” Olvey says.

Charlie Watts, one of the Rolling Stones rock group, bought one of Olvey’s mares and flew her to England. Olvey has spent time around Wayne Newton, one of the top Arabian breeders in the country, as well as the late actor Patrick Swayze. “At a horse show, everybody is just an Arabian horse person,” Olvey says. “Even Swayze you wouldn’t have thought was anybody special. He was there because he loved the horse and he wanted to compete and blend in.”

Until recently, his resident trainer, Les Sichini, handled the horses at shows. But three years ago Olvey started showing as an amateur with two of his Aradon-bred colts, Pysnario and Phantasy. He started winning right out of the chute.

“I’ve never had so much fun,” he admits. “I won in Scottsdale, won the Region 12 (a big Southeast show) and at National, I was in the top 10 out of 29 horses. I was thrilled with that.”

While he used to enjoy trail riding, he can’t ride anymore due to back surgery. His carpet business, Don’s Carpet One, keeps him pretty busy, and so does his fight with cancer. “In 2003 I was told I had two years to live,” he says. “Three and a half years later, I was told that again. I’ve been undergoing treatments for nine years, and I’m still in the battle. I’m really a strong believer, I’m a Christian, and I’m at peace with whatever God wants.”

Portuguese roots planted in Gallant

Robert and Carolyn Crum were living in West Palm Beach, Fla., when they saw their first Andalusian horse. “He was a gorgeous black exhibition horse, and we started talking to his trainer,” Carolyn relates. “We decided to start breeding Andalusians.”

In 2001, they went to Mexico to get married on the farm of a breeder of Andalusians and Lusitanos. Intending to buy an Andalusian, they came home with a Lusitano stallion and mare instead.

The Andalusian and the Lusitano are related, both having come originally from Spain, according to Carolyn. That country used them for bullfighting. When Spain outlawed bullfighting, there was nothing for the Spanish horse to do. So Spaniards started breeding them for beauty and elegance. The Portuguese still used these horses for bullfighting and trained them for the ring by having them work cattle in the fields.

“The Portuguese horse stayed more true to its roots than the Andalusian did,” Carolyn says. “The Lusitano is from Portugal.”

Originally from Birmingham, Carolyn was an attorney in Atlanta for several years when she decided to make a change and moved to Florida. That’s where she met Robert, who was in the construction business. It was a second marriage for both of them, and they shared a common interest in horses.

For the next 10 years, the Crums bred, trained and showed their horses. They concentrated on quality, rather than quantity, and their two stallions and two broodmares produced one or two babies each year. But they usually had half a dozen foals, colts and fillies of various ages and levels of training. Then the economy went sour, construction work dried up, and their health took a turn for the worse. The Crums had to make a difficult decision. “We almost got out of the horse business,” Carolyn says. “But we enjoy being able to see them every day. So we downsized to a smaller operation and changed our focus to breeding only.”

They also decided to leave Florida. With Carolyn’s roots in Alabama, they looked in this state and in Tennessee for some farmland and found a place in Gallant that was already set up for breeding warmbloods. They moved there in January, bringing trainer Whitney Wenzel, an Auburn University graduate from South Carolina, with them.

“It was a difficult move for 11 horses and all that equipment,” says Carolyn. “Half of my furniture is still in my guest house in Florida.” The Crums live in an apartment that’s part of their 17-stall barn, with plans to build a house one day.

Their breeding stock now includes three stallions and two broodmares. The grand old man of Shangrila Farms is Exaustivo, a 27-year-old who was born and trained at the Alter Real Stud in Portugal. The Alter Real was founded by the king of Portugal in the 1500s to breed classical equitation horses. Veneno Imperial is their 10-year-old exotic, buckskin-colored stallion imported from Brazil. Bolero (nicknamed Muffin) is a 6-year-old Shangrila Farm baby, whose grandsire was an international champion jumper, Novilheiro, ridden by famed British horseman John Whittaker. Bolero and Veneno have been featured in several international equine calendars.

They also have a couple of pets, including a rescued thoroughbred and a miniature horse named Cooper who loves to escape his corral and do laps around the barn. In addition, Whitney has five horses of her own.

At seven months, the Shangrila foals are weaned and ready to be matched up with a buyer, if they haven’t already been sold in-utero (before birth). The latter sell for $6,000, while the foals go for $8,000 and the weanlings for $10,000. The average would be $18,000 for a 2- to 3-year old, $22,000 – $25,000 for a 4-year-old under saddle with basic training. It isn’t unusual, however, for a Lusitano with great bloodlines and basic dressage training to go for $45,000, while one at the Grand Prix level of dressage could command $125,000.

“Lusitanos are used primarily for dressage. That’s where the market is,” Carolyn says. “They make wonderful cow horses, but no one wants one for that. They are too expensive for that discipline.”

After two heart surgeries, Carolyn, 75, can no longer ride. Neither does Robert, 72. The horses keep them young in mind and heart, though. They produce a calming effect on Carolyn, whether she’s rubbing their necks or watching them frolic in the pasture. The babies are her biggest joy, and she’s looking forward to a new crop next year.

“We haven’t had any babies for the last two years because of the economy, ” she says. “The number of our semen shipments are down, too. Horses are a reflection of the economy. But I‘m optimistic about this year.”