Uh-oh, someone left the back door wide open at Scott and Lisa Mathes’ house. “No, that’s fine,” says Scott. “The door is usually open when we’re home.” Scott and Lisa take the whole concept of indoor-outdoor living literally. Who wouldn’t, given these views, this privacy, and those big cozy patio chairs under the towering shade trees?
“When we think back to how we wound up here,” says Scott, “we’re absolutely amazed.”
Scott and Lisa had been planning to drive from their home in Peoria, Illinois, to North Carolina, where they’d moved their youngest child, Molly, into a dorm at Davidson College. A friend told Scott he needed to take Lisa to a nice hotel so she could cry on sheets with high thread counts. Scott did some research along the eastern seaboard only to find what appeared to be a Ritz-Carlton tucked into this place called Reynolds Lake Oconee, and the amazement commenced.
[Scott] I called the hotel and started out with an uncomfortable question: Is this a real Ritz-Carlton? The lady on the other end laughed and said, “Yes.” Until then, we didn’t know there was a Greensboro in Georgia and had never heard of Lake Oconee.
[Lisa] We didn’t expect what we saw. On the road to the hotel, we slowed down to look at The Kingdom, Lake Oconee, and the beautiful golf fairways. For the first time in our travels, I said to Scott, “I think I could live here.”
[Scott] I was thinking the exact same thing. We felt it could be home even though we hadn’t even seen a house yet.
[Scott] Our lives had been very structured. As a pilot in the military, I learned to use checklists and had to live by a tight schedule. There was also a lot of structure when I worked in leadership for Merrill Lynch, and that kind of detail spilled into our daily life. But something began to happen at Reynolds.
[Lisa] We’d always been told where we had to live. Scott’s flight experience with the Air Force required extensive travel—to all seven continents and all 50 states. He’d sometimes have to leave in the middle of the night and be gone for a week or two. His corporate career involved more flying and a lot of moves. So it was exciting when we started thinking, “Where would we want to live when no one is telling us where we have to go?”
