Caterer’s new home in Villanova features gourmet kitchens, inside and out

In a contest for making the biggest understatement, Steve Finley would definitely have been in contention.

“I love to cook,” he says.

Steve, owner of Philadelphia-based Finley Catering, one of the area’s largest catering businesses, was standing in the kitchen of his recently completed home in Villanova, organized around cooking and entertaining.

Wife Carol was making coffee with a water supply bubbling up from a basement filter; Steve was leaning against a marble island about the size of a small hockey rink. Outside, down a gentle slope, the view stretched out like a scene from Italy.

There is no formal living room, just a large family room adjoining the kitchen. Combined with a huge outdoor culinary headquarters, it enables the couple to regularly host parties for as many as 50 people.

Furnishings look more like something from a beach house than a home on the Main Line.

“We didn’t want formal,” says Carol, who taught fifth grade for more than two decades. “We wanted fun. Clean, easy, minimal.”

Their previous home, in Upper Providence, was built around a previous hobby — in that case, Carol’s passion for antiques. Those have been sold in the conversion to casual entertaining.

Finley’s business life is centered in his four venues for weddings and other large events. Three are in the city — the Crystal Tea Room at the Wanamaker Building, the ballroom in the former Ben Franklin Hotel, and Union Trust on Chestnut Street. The fourth is the Ballroom at Ellis Preserve in Newtown Square.

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The “events” at his home are strictly for friends, relatives and other guests.

For Steve, the culinary odyssey started when he was 12 and growing up in Upper Darby, cooking, operating a lemonade stand, and selling popcorn.

He and Carol met as college students at a seafood restaurant in Springfield, Delaware County, where he was a cook and she was a waitress.

He took over an industrial cafeteria in Clifton Heights in 1976 and soon started outside catering. He did his first wedding in 1981, the year after he and Carol were married. “I realized you can charge more for a wedding than a party,” he says.

“There weren’t that many caterers back then,” he recalls. “Supermarkets didn’t do catering. Restaurants didn’t do catering. And I was the little guy.”

Architect Richard Buchanan, a principal in the West Chester-based architectural firm Archer & Buchanan, said the house, built of limestone salvaged from a Bucks County bank barn with a slate roof, presented unusual challenges due to the wide-open layout.

The 5,800-square-foot, four-bedroom house is “held up by wood and steel, and it required larger volumes than we’d normally use,” Buchanan says.

His separate indoor and outdoor cooking areas are in constant use, except in the winter, which the Finleys spend on Florida’s Gulf Coast but still are connected electronically. Through a monitor in Florida, Steve once saw a fox making off with a package left at his front door.

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Not surprisingly, the two cooking areas look like something from a small restaurant rather than a private home. The six-burner Wolf range and the outdoor oven both have extra-large vents, and the pizza oven is a showpiece. Buchanan has divided the outdoor structure into a cooking shelter and garage.

Inside, the kitchen includes an embedded microwave oven, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, cooled beverage drawers, and a walk-in pantry.

“All the water lines have double filters,” Steve says. “Water’s tough on products.”

He helped build the 2,000-bottle wine cellar himself after he found the off-the-rack models unreasonably priced.

“Everybody likes to watch him cook,” Carol says. Often he teams up with brother, Tom, who also works in the firm, as do the Finleys’ two daughters, Michelle and Stephanie.

“We do put a little show on,” he says. “When I’m cooking steaks, I smoke it up.

“People don’t have to worry about dropping things. Sunday mornings I just go out and hose it down. Sometimes people make a mess.”

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