Arrive as Guests. Leave as Friends.

Get away and relax at The Garden House bed and Breakfast.

Presented In Partnership With Stay Inn The Heartland.

Hold on, there’s a big boat going by. We’re sitting outside.” It’s a perfect 74-degree day, and Shannon and Todd Watkins are relaxing on the dock that adjoins The Garden House Bed and Breakfast as they share their backgrounds and what brought them here.

Todd and Shannon bought the bed-and-breakfast in 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was plenty of time to scroll online and dream about a new life. When Shannon found The Garden House Bed and Breakfast was for sale, they took a trip from their home in Iowa, and within a week, they decided to move.

Todd says that if they had known the pandemic was about to shut down the world, they would not have risked starting a new business, but as it turns out, it was their best year to date. “Typically there’s about four million visitors between the two holidays every summer, and in 2021, ’22, and ’23, there were around eight million,” Todd says.

The Watkins have been in the hotel business their whole lives, Shannon in sales and Todd in operations. “We don’t know which one of us said it. One of us said, ‘Oh, it would be great to own a bed-and-breakfast someday,’ ” Todd says.

They bought the business turnkey, with guests in the house the day they started. Previous owners Lil and Doug Meyer hung around for a month, showing Todd and Shannon the ropes. Since then, they have painted, refreshed the furniture in each room, and bought new linens and towels.

The Watkins also added onto the dock. “We added a swim platform, a little bar with a TV and refrigerator, kayaks, and paddleboards. We’ll have a lot of guests that will just hang out on the dock, and then we’ll see them down there later at night with a bottle of wine,” Todd says.

Todd does the cooking and cleaning, and Shannon does the bookkeeping and gardening, in addition to her fulltime “real job,” as Todd says, doing group sales for BWH Hotels. Shannon adds, with a laugh, that they refer to Todd’s role of running the bed-and-breakfast as “the retired job.”

Over 30 indoor plants came with the house, alongwith huge gardens at the back of the house where they grow tomatoes, peppers, jalapeños, onions, and herbs. Todd, who has always liked cooking and baking, incorporates fresh veggies and herbs into the breakfasts he makes. He has a repertoire of about 10 days’ worth of breakfasts, including made-to-order omelets, French toast, waffles, a Mediterranean breakfast pie, an all-American breakfast, and a ham, egg, and cheese ciabatta. “I’ve cracked a lot of eggs in six years,” Todd says.

Guests come to celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, honeymoons, or they come to relax, hang out on the dock, and watch boats go by. “We ask them if they have plans, and most of them are like, ‘Nope, we just came to get away, just came to relax,’ ” Shannon says.

Shannon and Todd’s favorite part of running the business is their guests and meeting people from all over the world. “We’ve had a lot of repeat guests we’ve gotten to know and become friends with who come back year after year,” Shannon says. “We made up a new sign a few years back that says, ‘Arrive as guests. Leave as friends.’

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• 4 Haney Road, Rocky Mount • TheGardenHouseBNB.com

All photos courtesy of Shannon and Todd Watkins

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This article was originally printed in the September 2026 issue of Missouri Life.