Hi there! We’re Laura and Eric McGlynn. We met in South Florida in 2003, and were married five years later. Laura has been a bit of a nomad all her life, living in four states and ten towns within the US before winding up in Palm Beach County. Eric grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and attended college in Boston before moving to Florida to begin his career. Knowing that our someday-in-the-future home wasn’t any of the places either of us have lived before, we started traveling the world together in 2004 looking for that something next.
As lovers of food, wine, hospitality, culture and travel, we set out to create an independent and mobile lifestyle that would give us the opportunity to experience all those things, often and well. Our entrepreneurship journey began in 2014, when we purchased a commercial building in South Florida and began construction on Social House, a boutique community-based coworking and event space for creatives. That same year, we took our first trip to the Pacific Northwest, went on a small group wine tour, and fell in love with the Willamette Valley.
how we wound up with three four homes
That same year, we came back for a short second trip, then a longer third one; the fourth trip was spent hunting for land we could build a dream on, because we knew we’d finally found what we’d been looking for.
The one thing we didn’t love about the region (at the time): lodging options. With just one upscale hotel, and most of the available vacation homes not really fitting our style, finding a suitable place to stay was expensive and a challenge. When a charming little one bedroom cottage in downtown Newberg came on the market, we jumped on it: remodeling it and renting it out when we weren’t in town was the perfect solution for us. With just one bedroom, through, we had no way to host friends and family, so when the adorable bungalow next door (that needed SO much TLC, but was so deserving of it) came up for sale a short time later, purchasing and renovating it seemed like the right thing to do. With our backgrounds in design and real estate, we felt up to the challenge of bringing both homes back to their full potential.
A short time after we purchased the cottage, we discovered McMinnville, and fell head over heels for a beautiful home on Park Drive. After two years spent searching for land, and finding that we were increasingly being priced out of a highly appreciating market, we decided that being in downtown McMinnville might work best for us after all – we just couldn’t pass up the chance to be walking distance to Third Street. We made the leap and purchased the Park House in the summer of 2016.
Over the next three years, with the help of our talented contractor team MD Haney & Co, we carefully and thoughtfully renovated all three charming homes into the perfect home-away-from-homes for people like us: creative work/lifestyle travelers who appreciate everything this beautiful area has to offer. And in doing so, we started to build the concept of what our company, View + Vine, would be. We never really forgot that original dream of land, though…
what’s now & next
In the fall of 2020, after: five years of searching, welcoming an unexpected addition to the family named Wes, and mostly giving up on the possibility of EVER finding what we were looking for, we finally purchased a five acre property north of Newberg and are working on building the dream. We’ll be sharing updates on instagram if you’d like to follow along!
In the meantime, if you’re looking to spend some time in this place that inspires us like no other place in the country, take a look at our three vacation rental properties in the Willamette Valley and check out our personally curated local guide with in-depth info about our favorite spots.
And if you’d like to collaborate on something here in the area, let us know!
big thanks to Coviello Photo for the snaps!