Breakfast at Tiffany’s ain’t over until the piano lady plays and the opera man sings in the mountains of Mills River, North Carolina.
Photo Above: Karen and Craig Verm are the music-performing proprietors of the Bed & Breakfast on Tiffany Hill in Mills River, North Carolina. © Jared Kay
“We started performing a few songs after breakfast,” says innkeeper Karen Verm. “One of our guests decided to dub it ‘The Fourth Course.’”
The musical snack follows the first-course fruit, a hot entrée and a third-course dessert, usually served on a back porch overlooking woods and gardens.
Karen Verm spent two decades in music academia at Texas, Pennsylvania and most recently at Morgantown, West Virginia, before packing her piano and parking her passion for pancakes and pastries at the Bed & Breakfast on Tiffany Hill, a seven-bedroom home built in 2009.
Craig Verm, Karen’s husband of 20 years, is a handyman at heart plus a sous chef. Yet his self-styled “incredible career” performing opera took him to four continents and across America, including stages at Asheville as well as Knoxville, Tennessee.
These married musicians arrived on Tiffany Hill in 2024.
“We knew that we wanted to include music in some capacity because it’s been such a big part of our careers and our lives,” Karen says.
The usual repertoire rounds up renditions of the very-fitting “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as well as “If Ever I Would Leave You” from “Camelot.”
Audiences of all ages stay mesmerized, including one 6-year-old girl from Texas who simply requested, “Fourth Course, please.”
“When I open up the mouth and start singing, I’m as close as three or four feet away. The phones immediately come out and people start filming,” Craig says. “It is fun to introduce people to full-body, full-throated singing.”
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2025 issue.
