HOUSE TOUR | An Artist's European-Inspired Nashville Home

Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Kelly. Welcome to my Nashville home. Come on in. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Hi, I'm Kelly Estes. I'm an artist and interior designer. Welcome to my home in Nashville, Tennessee. We've been in this home for 32 years, and when we first bought it, we bought it from the original owners. The lady we bought it from was in her late 70s, and her parents built the home. So as you can imagine, it was a lot of very dark colors and sheers on every window, heavy drapes, valances, Victorian furniture, a lot of wallpaper. And at the time, we had one child. We since have had two others, so I have a total of three children. They're now all grown, but we raised them here in the house. The first few years, we spent a lot of time stripping off wallpaper by hand, painting the house ourselves. But the home has evolved dramatically over the years. But I do remember when we first bought it, I brought my mom in. She said, I don't know. I don't know why you've bought this house. It is so dark and dreary. And I said, well, just wait. It's going to transform. And now it's very light and open feeling, I think. Welcome to my living room. This room has a lot of windows and doors and openings, and the space kind of felt empty without something over here. So I ended up getting this low cabinets by a German company. When I did that, I removed the drapes. This was, you know, fairly recently. And I got a nice natural fabric shade because I had been to this amazing place in Paris called Ogato, which is a Japanese store and tea shop. And they had some woven shades. And I thought, I'd like to incorporate that in this room. I've got some of my own sculpture in here. There's a piece right here in marble. I love the patina on these bowls. They were in a shipwreck, and they were underwater for 300 years. So I've collected quite a few objects from Jalan Jalan. It's a shop here in Nashville that imports things from mainly Indonesia and Bali. These pieces right here are also from the same shop. So back to the coffee table, I have to tell you, this was a larger steel coffee table that I had for years with a glass top. And I just really wanted it to be a little less sleek and a little bit more organic feeling. So I had the table cut down. And then I added a piece of limestone, just I liked that texture. It's a very tone on tone room. But you know, I just think I've got this Moroccan rug, it just kind of, it's all about the texture. I've got some of my favorite art books here. This piece of art is a pastel that I did. This is my daughter on the left. She used to dance at Nashville Ballet when she was growing up. And so I went into their class and took some photos. And this is the result of that. It's in pastel, it's on sanded board. The chairs, we've probably had these about 15 or 20 years. They're from flex form. One of the things I love about the chair, the back has woven leather on it. This is a Kuba cloth I got in Africa on one of our travels. But the back right here has this beautiful leather. They're kind of deep chairs, but they're very comfortable. And I like that they don't have arms because it's a large room lengthwise, but it's very narrow. And so furniture takes up a lot of space in this room. So I tended to do armless things. These sconces I added, they're by Charlotte Perriand, mid-century. I just love her sconces. We've got a piano here. My daughter and I used to play, I learned as an adult. And after a few lessons, I said, no more kumbaya. Like I want to play something I want to hear. So I was really supposed to be learning to read the sheet music, but I never really got that very well. So I would memorize like Moonlight Sonata, things I wanted to hear and could play it, you know, as long as it was memorized, but now I've forgotten it. The bowls on the piano are done by my father. He's a woodturner. So I have a lot of his pieces. So this is a marble sculpture that I did. And it's the largest sculpture I've done in marble thus far. I loved how the veining actually tracked the curves of the female torso. And when you first get the block, it's very opaque. It just looks like a white block. And you have no idea what the veining patterns are going to be. But as you start chipping away and then, you know, grinding it, polishing it, the pattern emerges. And it just happened to to lie across her form so beautifully, I think. This is a Calacatta Viola. So it's violet is the color that's in this marble. And it this piece took quite a long time, probably about nine months, maybe a little longer from start to finish, but it was a huge 700 pounds. It's about 450 now. When we bought this house, the ceiling was the whole house is plaster and the ceiling was plaster, but it was starting to fall in. That was the condition we bought the house in. And we were on a very strict budget at that time. And my parents have a hundred acre farm out at well, it's over a hundred acres out in Nolensville. And their house was built in 1860. And it had these type of ceilings. So I thought, well, we'll just do that. So we put the board up to completely cover the plaster that was crumbling. And I think it adds a nice touch. The fireplace is original, but I removed some medallions and kind of curly cue things that I didn't really care for. And I found this at an architectural salvage store. And it was an old cold furnace door. It had a door on the bottom part. And so I had that cut off and inserted here because when we bought it, it had flesh color marble on the hearth and the sides. And it was, it was cracked and dirty. It just wasn't very attractive. So we replaced that. Originally the room had just a small window at each end. And so at some point I lowered all the windows on the front of the house all the way down to the ground, which just really, I don't know, added some height in the room and made it feel a little brighter and opened it up to the outside more. A few years ago, we had traditional French doors across the back that kind of looked like these and they were starting to rot. So I replaced them with this glass and steel door here. And there's a door in the middle and the side lights. And it just, it was like night and day because the steel you just see straight through. And it really brought the outdoors in. This is a cool cool. It's a piece also from that same shop called Jalon Jalon. And it was a drum that they would beat to round up the villagers. This is another piece by my father. And this is a Japanese cedar. It's from a Japanese artist out of Kyoto. And this is another marble that's mine. Now let's head into the screen porch. So this is our screened-in porch. We spend a lot of time out here in the summer. And people are always asking me, oh, don't you want to glass it in? No, I really don't because I don't need another room. And I like the fact that it's seasonal. And we, we use it through to the fall. We'll make s'mores out here, especially when the kids come over. The porch is original to the house, although we added the fireplace 25 years ago and we vaulted the ceiling. The lanterns, those I had custom made. This table was just a slab I found at a marble yard of Portuguese limestone. And I just love the stone. So I just had a guy make a little wooden base and it's just sitting on there, but it works. And this is an antique French table or sculpture stand. Actually, I'm using it as a table, but I actually do sculpt out here some days and just take this off. It's from Ennebee Home. They import things from Europe and they have wonderful things. It's an amazing shop here in Nashville, but I love it. It's, it's pretty old. I think the, maybe the early 1800s and some French sculptor worked on this. I would describe my interiors as kind of minimalist, but I do like beautiful things. And obviously I like art and I have a lot of art in the home. My own, my son, my daughter, my, my father, you know, we all create things. So sometimes I'll move objects in and out because I don't like too much clutter. So I'm kind of minimal when it comes to that. It's hard to describe exactly what style, but I will say I am most influenced by a lot of European designers. There are several French, Italian, Japanese designers as well that I really look to for anything from clean lines to the type of organic materials and furniture that I see in a lot of those. I like originality. I'm not into trends. I don't care what the Pantone color of the year is. It's just irrelevant to me. In my own home, I really enjoy having a lot of white walls because I am changing the art often, but for clients, you know, I'll lean into what their preferences are. I like creating some, some spaces to be more cozy and darker, maybe a more winter time or evening feeling room. And I love to juxtapose those with a real light and bright space. I think that transition as you walk through is really nice. I'm always very mindful of the outdoors and natural light. So I tend to, in my own home, not have many drapes or things that cover up the windows. We're kind of set back off the street. So there's plenty of privacy and yeah, I enjoy, I enjoy the natural light tracking through a room, different seasons, different times of day. That's important. Welcome to the library. And this is where I have a lot of my art books. I have read all of those and reference them often. I've got some design books, also quite a few history books, a little bit of fiction. I like historical fiction as well, but mainly art, art and design. This light, which is really cool, it's by a German sculptor, but I liked how it just highlighted this area. So I put a few things of interest on these shelves so they could be in the light. I've got some masks that, again, I got at the Jalon Jalon shop. There's a sculpture down there that's mine. There's some wood turnings that are my father's on these shelves. This is kind of our evening space where we hang out. We've got our TV here because there really wasn't a good wall to put it on with all of these windows and openings. We really enjoy this room a lot at night and particularly at the winter time. We always have a fire going in the evenings. The coffee table is a table I designed. I had a guy make the base out of steel and then chose a piece of marble for the top. This is one of my bronze sculptures. It's a Nootka woman. It was a tribe. The Nootkas lived in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Vancouver Island, and they made their clothing out of cedar barks. They were a peaceful tribe that did basket weaving as their main craft, and I just wanted to capture that. The hand is also a piece that I've done in bronze. The sofa, this is from B&B Italia. It's a classic Charles sofa. We've had this for probably 20 years at least and probably needs to get a new cushion, a new cover on the cushion, but it's served us really well. The two chairs in this room are vintage Le Corbusier chairs, and the one chair by the fireplace is very rare. I bought that in Copenhagen from a gallery there that I really love. It's called Classic Copenhagen, and it's a mid-century piece by a designer, Paul Cajolhorn, and normally you see his chairs, the pique chairs, are very famous in metal, but this particular one was a rare one done out of plywood. The rug, I just, I wanted to bring in some other color and wanted it to be very natural, so it is a hand-dyed rug from Nepal, and I got it from a designer that I work with out of Miami. The large photograph here is by, unfortunately, a late artist from Nashville. I love collecting other artists' work. Mac McBurney was his name, and he photographed native things in Tennessee, so this is a very classic mid-century design by Floss, and it's very industrial, and it gives you some nice uplighting, and my husband likes to sit here in the mornings and read, and this is his spot, and he likes to use this lamp. The walls have grass cloth on it. This room's been a couple different colors over the 30 years that we've lived here, but I really like the warmth and the texture. I feel like the grass cloth gives the room a little more depth than just painting it a solid color, so this is an abstract bronze figure that I did a few years ago, and I like the patina on it against the grass cloth. I think it's nice, and then I'll show you this other sculpture that is, I'm very glad to have. This was the very first piece that my mentor, Bill Doak, cast in the Bluefield Foundry, so it's very old, probably late 60s, and when he passed away recently, he was 94, I was able to acquire this piece of his. This piece is out of raw steel. I designed it to hold the wood, because we do burn a lot of wood with our fireplace, and I had a local guy make this. This is a photograph of a Native American by Lee Crum. Lee's also living in Nashville now, very well-known photographer. This is an abstract bison that I did out of black marble. You can see the little detailing there. I call it buffalo rider. We don't actually have buffalo in the United States. They're really truly bison, and the Indians did not ride them, but they often would have to jump on with their spear, and I just liked the abstract idea of that. This vase is by McCarty. They're in Marigold, Mississippi, and they make beautiful pottery. Usually, I've got a large collection in the kitchen that's brown, so it's unusual to see it in green. This house was built in 1930, and it's your typical colonial style. The front has large columns, a porch that's covered out front. It's brick. The house was originally, when it was built, was painted white and had a green roof because the owners wanted it to look like the White House, but by the time we bought it, the paint was peeling off, so we pressure washed the outside and just sort of helped that along. So, as you'll see later, it's kind of got a speckled brick look that really shows the age. I love the patina of that on the brick, and we've added a lot of modern touches, some steel glass windows and doors that have really brightened it up. When we first bought this house, it was kind of a good thing that we couldn't afford to do very much right away as a young couple because you change your mind once you live in a space, so as we lived here, we realized the original kitchen was very small. It was a little galley kitchen, and for our family of five, we really wanted the kitchen to be the heart of the home, and we needed a larger kitchen, so in 2000, we added on, which is, I can't believe, 25 years ago, but we added on a really large family kitchen, and so that's been a major change, and when we did that, we added an extra bedroom, bathroom on top. The master bedroom is up there, so we have a total of four bedrooms now. That was probably the biggest change. The other really dramatic change that we did was, it used to be that the back of the house sort of just stopped, and there was about an eight-foot gap between the back door and the ground below, and there was no garden at that time. It was just grass, so we added a terrace that kind of, you step out of the doors, and you go down a level. There's a beautiful terrace, and then you go on down into the garden, so it was kind of a midpoint that we created for entertaining, and just, we eat out there a lot when the weather's nice, but it kind of eased you down into the garden, and it really connected the outdoors and the indoors in a much better way. So this is our dining room. It's pretty much how it was when we bought the house, except it had layer upon layer of very dark wallpaper. We stripped off the wallpaper, and this is the original 1930s plaster. Back in the 30s, the plaster that they used had a lot of marble dust and lime in it. It's no longer made that way, but when I cleaned it off, I scrubbed it all with comet cleaner, and it is so smooth. I wish you could feel it. It feels like marble, and all the stains on it are just from the glue, the glue stains, and the homeowner, the original homeowner that we bought the house from, she came over after I had done this, and she's very southern, and she said, now Kelly, are you gonna paint or paper this room? And I said, Miss Patty, I'm leaving it just like this. She said, well, it's your house, and it's probably my favorite wall, you know, in the whole house, my favorite texture. I just love it. I wish the whole house could be like this, but it's only because it had never been painted, and it was just the original plaster underneath the wallpaper. This piece of art right here is a colored pencil. It's done by my son, Christopher, and just a lot of hours for that drawing. The chairs, these also are from Ennebee Home. They're by Pierre Chapeau, a French designer, again, kind of mid-century, and I just think the detail and the joinery is so exquisite on these, so I was really, really happy to find these. The table is French. We got this probably about 20 years ago from a French dealer that had brought it to the Nashville Antique Garden Show, and I just loved it, and so we purchased that and have enjoyed it. It's got some stains, but that's just part of the patina of it. I love these up lights. These are by my favorite lighting designer of all times, and I've got several pieces of theirs, but Davidi Gruppi. They're Italian, and it's basically concrete with this big bulb, but I love the atmosphere it provides. So there was this natural indentation in the wall, and I had this cabinet made, and it's just very sleek, and I think such a nice juxtaposition with the natural plaster walls. This photograph I saw at a gallery in Carmel, California at the Western Gallery. The photographer is actually the artist that's in the photograph. She did an Americana series, and she went to this home in her family in Mississippi, and when I saw this, I thought this is exactly how this room looked. It had wallpaper similar to this, had dark furniture such as this when we bought the house, so I just liked that kind of reference to the old-timey look of how this room was. The artist is Daniel Nelson Mourning. This was the very first piece or two pieces that they go together that I did out of marble ever, and I didn't really know what I was doing, so I was figuring it out, but the interesting thing is I'd called a friend of mine and just said, do you know where I can get some chunks of marble? And he said, I happen to have two blocks that came off a building in downtown Nashville when it was demolished. So I got those, and I mocked it up in clay, and then just went to work, and this was the result, just two abstract shapes. Welcome to my kitchen. We recently remodeled this kitchen just this past summer, so it's about a year ago. We added this on 25 years ago, and it was kind of a front country French style then, and my tastes have grown more modern, so I wanted to update it. This is a boffy island, and I really wanted this stainless steel block that kind of felt like a piece of sculpture in the room, but it's also got so much storage. This is one of my favorite things now, just how organized I am with these drawers. There's just a place for everything, and then I've got lots of bowls. I've got my pots and pans down here, and when we did this remodel, we put in this glass and steel window. It just opened this up to the backyard in a really nice way. This is kind of a cool feature, too. This is my pantry, and it pulls out like this, and so there's no wasted dead space in the corner. So that's, I've really, I've loved how organized everything is with this new system here. The marble is Carrera, and I really wanted to use Carrera. I had it, and before we remodeled, I had it on the island, but I love to bake, and it's great for rolling things out, but growing up, my grandmother had a piece of furniture in her kitchen with Carrera marble on it, and I just, it reminds me of her. It's the most basic of Italian marbles, and I like that about it. It's just a very common element, but I think it's neutral. It's timeless. It's not trendy. Doesn't ever go out of style, and I did it two centimeters, which most people don't do now. I think the trend is three centimeters or thicker a lot of times, but I just like the classic look of the two centimeters. So I've got some Japanese tea containers, and I love that, you know, the brass just ages. I like how it has the patina. My son gave me this one made out of cherry bark, but I keep my teas in there, and I drink those every morning. This table we've had for, gosh, almost 30 years, and we got it from a dealer in Connecticut. One of my favorite things about this kitchen is the dish storage, and we did this when we remodeled 25 years ago. We added this, and I've not changed it. I really love it. I've got all these gorgeous royal Copenhagen dishes. When I was getting married, my mom and I went to the Nashville flea market, and we looked around. I was like, mom, there's nothing there, and she said, well, let's go in this one last building. We were about to walk out of that building, and here sat this little lady. She'd gone to Denmark and bought to an estate sale there and bought this whole entire set. It's like 14 pieces of everything, and she was asking $400. Now one plate is probably more than $400. I lost my mom a couple years ago, and this was a piece that she had. She also had some royal Copenhagen dishes, and I just thought I love that because it reminds me of her. I love to collect dishes. These I found at an antique store in Birmingham when I was doing a children's portrait there. I don't know the name of the pattern, but they're beautiful. These are by Lenox, and I also found these. Mom and I did at an antique store. They only had six, and we have looked and looked, and we've never been able to find this again. We know that the pattern is called Autumn, but nowadays it has the raised fruit basket in the center, and the rest of the plate is just plain bone china color. So I love that I've got the only ones I can find of these available. Got a lot of glassware. These also were from my mother. Found these kind of wonky ones in London. This plate is by the same potter that the green vase was out of. It's McCarty ware, and here's the Mississippi mud. They always have a piece of that, and I love to serve cheeses on this. I have a lot of the McCarty that I use for entertaining, and I love mixing and matching like dishes. I'll often put this combination together on a table. I think it's very pretty. It's hard to choose a favorite part or room that I like best about my home. This particular room is kind of my morning room. Nobody comes in here much but me in the mornings, and I love to just sit in here. I drink matcha and read. You know, I like to get up very early, so I really enjoy this room in the mornings. In the evenings, we're usually in our library. The TV is in there, and we also have a wood-burning fireplace in there that we enjoy a lot in the winter. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I love to cook, and that is kind of the hub of the home, probably the kitchen. That's where everybody tends to hang out a lot. Now we're heading into my office. Welcome to my office. This is that little wing space that I was telling you about that was original to the house. It was originally used as a breakfast room, but I've turned it into my own little private office. The chairs are French, and they were just covered in muslin, so I decided to kind of go crazy with some patterns, but I loved this toile. Put that on, and a couple of different shades of green. I recently changed out the rug. I found this. It's one that was carried on the back of camels. I got it from Robin Raines Design in Nashville. The desk is an old map drawer. Let's see, that end opens, but it's got a long drawer that pulls out, and they used to store maps in it, but I just love this spot, and I can watch the birds outside. The lamp is by Inglemar. All the wood turnings are done by my father, so it's a great little spot to read. These are my children when they were young. They're in their 30s now. This is a bronze that's one of mine that I put a green patina on. I like that sense of age. This is my sculptor mentor, Bill Doak, when he was young. My husband and I both use this space. It's also my laundry room, for lack of a better place to put it. I've got a hidden washer and dryer under these cabinets. I've got all my design books and catalogs and things, references that I use, a lot of magazines stored over here. This bronze is a piece that I did from a live model. This marble is another sculpture out of a beautiful Calacatta Oro, and originally, I have to tell you a little history about this room. This was the original kitchen of the house. It was a little galley kitchen, and there was a refrigerator there, a stove, and a sink over here. After we built the new kitchen 25 years ago, I told my husband, I want to make this space more inviting, and I want to add a glass box on the side of the house. He said, you are absolutely crazy, but we did it. My husband now loves this room. He sits here with his computer and feels like he's the captain of his ship, and it looks out into the side garden. We both have our computer stations, and I did this floating Corian countertop here just to maximize the light and the view. Before we head up to the primary bedroom, I just wanted to pause here by the staircase. This is our side family entrance, and this cabinet is ... I got this at NV Home. It's Hans Wagner, and the lights are Christian Liek. Then the painting is by a Swedish painter named Nick Alm. My son has studied with him a couple times, and I just admired his work. The bowl is by my father, and the vase is another piece I got at Jalan Jalan. I love walking in the door, and it gives you a place to put your keys, but also I just think it's a charming welcome, and the art sometimes changes. The flowers are always changing, and it just sort of greets you as you come in the door. This is our primary bedroom. This was added above the kitchen when we added on 25 years ago, and it's very minimal. The ceilings are 11 feet in here, so I did this nice kind of sheer canopy, which gives it a little dreamy aspect, but it's not too feminine for my husband. The tables I designed, they're out of glass, and I had someone make those. This is a drawing by my son. He's at Lyme Academy in Connecticut. He's 28, and this was a drawing that he did. This is a charcoal drawing that I did from a model that I hired, and it's kind of wispy, but I feel like I got the essence of her. This is a Massimo Listri photograph of a villa in Florence, and I've spent twice. I've spent a month or more in Florence studying at the Charles Cecil School when I was in my 40s, and I just loved any reference to Florence, and I think it just adds a dreamy kind of aspect to the room. This low chest of drawers I designed and had a local cabinetmaker make it for me, and it just gives a ton of storage, but I love the wood finish on it. I've got a couple of pieces here. Limoge from my mother. She gave me these. A necklace that my husband gave me recently for an anniversary gift, and it opens, and it has a secret message inside, and it's got a poem that I had liked. It's by Jennifer Alfano. She's in New York. I love peonies. This is an antique tea caddy that was my grandmother's, and I love Perfume by Perfumer H out of London. It's the only perfume that I can wear because I seem to have a reaction to a lot of them. I began my career when I was 30 as a professional painter. I started doing children's portraits in oil and pastel, and that was kind of my bread and butter. Sometimes I would do an adult or a mom and her kids. I also painted a lot of still lifes and landscapes, but my children were at a young age, and I was painting other young children, so it was difficult to do with young children, but if there's a will, there's a way, and I was determined to carve out time for that career, and it's really my passion. Then about 15 years ago, I decided I kind of wanted to explore sculpture, and I had never done any sculpture before. However, growing up, we had a pediatrician, our pediatrician, that lived right behind us in our backyards joined, and he was also a sculptor, very, very well-known, William Doak, very well-known in the 70s for the Bluefield Foundry. He had a very small foundry in our backyards, and so I was kind of fascinated at that as a child, but then we fast forward, and now I'm living here, and one day I see him in his, he was probably late 70s, rollerblading down our road, and I flagged him down and said, I'm, you know, kind of interested in learning sculpture, so he showed up the next day with some handmade tools, a clump of wax, a clump of clay, said, do something with it, and that began my adventure into sculpture. As far as my career as a designer, I just was always very interested in interiors, architecture, I can see spatially, which really informs my sculpture a lot, and then also the the drawing skills required with drawing and painting inform my sculpture and also my interior design. So, I did my own house, and a friend saw it, asked me to do hers, kind of began it word of mouth from there. Other people saw hers, they saw mine, and then I built up a team of craftsmen, I've got wonderful, you know, painters and cabinet designers, and just all the trades, you know, I've got people I work with regularly, and it's still very small, it's just me, it's word of mouth, and I take, you know, one or two clients a year. For me, the interior is just another canvas, and now I'll give you a peek in my studio. So, welcome to my studio, it's in the basement, but it's a functional space, this is where I'll paint or maybe mock up a sculpture design in clay or wax, got a workbench, it's pretty utilitarian, a lot of tools, I've got my easel in here, a few paintings sitting around that I'm working on, I'm working on a series from our trip to Africa, so that's what you're looking at. Ideally, I'd love to have a studio with natural light, but this is what I have, and I put in daylight bulbs, and then for my marble work, I take my work outside, so this is a good place to paint. During the spring and summer months, I'm mainly working outdoors on marble, and I kind of reserve my painting to rainy days and winter time, because I'd, you know, I'd rather use the nice days to work on sculpture while I can. So, the garden has greatly evolved since we've been here, when we first moved in, there was basically in the backyard just grass, it was open to the yard, to the house behind us, and to the side of us, so it was just free-flowing yard, and we had one giant elm tree, and that was really all that was in the back of the house. The front had some beautiful old ancient oak and magnolia trees and ash trees, but the back just was grounded by this one elm, so I would go to garden shops and buy very small, like, you know, three, four foot tall magnolia trees and planted them in the back. I bought a lot of boxwoods bare root, they were literally the size of my finger, because that's what I could afford, planted them in hedges, and now they're thick, lush hedges. So, all of that has been created, things have moved many times as I would plan them, then some things would do well, some things wouldn't, they need to be removed, or maybe I didn't like it when it got larger. I don't know, I've shifted things around a lot, we've had, you know, ice storms and events that where we've lost a lot of plants, and sometimes in the replacement process, I would redesign it a little bit. I've added a sculpture in the backyard, so I created a focal point and wanted to frame that with some cherry trees, so it's always evolving, and I think that's what's so beautiful about a garden, is it is living, and you know, things do well, and then all of a sudden they don't, and it's kind of life. And there's always, you know, the garden is changing every season as well, and I like to have the structure of evergreens in the garden, so that in winter, you know, it's still beautiful, even without flowers and foliage, but that's what makes it, I think, enjoyable. Welcome to the terrace in the garden. We enjoy eating out here a lot. The table and chairs are by VIP, and they're a Scandinavian company. You can see the texture of the brick, it's where we pressure wash the original brick. The paint's kind of half on and half off, but I like that. It just adds another layer of patina. Let's head into the garden. This is my white garden, kind of after Vida Sackville West. I loved that idea of planting different flowers that were white, creams, pale yellows, that bloom mostly in the spring, a little bit in the summer, but there was nothing that you see at all in the space, except for that elm tree when we bought the house 32 years ago. So this has all grown and matured and been planted in the last 32 years. A lot of it started out very small, now it's gotten large. I love the dappled shade. It was a perfect spot for my modern Athena bronze sculpture, and she took two years start to finish, and a lot of people are like, why are the legs not connected? Well, I feel like the negative space is very important. Once again, it creates kind of a void, and your imagination can fill in those details, and it gives you more perspective on the piece. This is a woodsy part of our yard and garden, and I love, in a shaded area, the sense of mystery that you get, and we've got these little lanterns kind of leading the eye down this path. It's very delightful in the evening. When my daughter got married, we had her wedding out here. We had a dinner, and we had twinkly lights set up, and it was just a beautiful space. I've got a little bit more formal cutting garden, and I'm very sad to say, all my roses, I've got old roses, old English roses, and they were just blooming, and something, I think it was a deer, came and ate them almost to the ground. Stems, thorns, flowers, so they're not going to be pretty today, but they're down there. I have a little cutting garden, and it's got boxwood hedges around it, and then I made a woodland path that will go on, and there's an outdoor fireplace, an old picnic table, so this is probably my favorite part of the yard. It's really just a shady sanctuary that is so nice to come in in the summer. I would say my home really comes alive most with family, and all of my kids are grown, but they've lived other places, but migrated back to Nashville, so they are here at the house quite a lot, which I love, and that just gives a sense of life to the house. The word home to me primarily means family, since I've raised my kids in this one particular house, but I think it also means a sanctuary, a place where you kind of escape from the world, and art is a very solitary endeavor, and so I do spend a lot of time here. My studio is here, so I'm creating art in my own home, for my home, also to sell, but you know, I create things that I just want to create, so I feel like it's a very creative environment here, and that's something I love about it. I also love that we've got, you know, enough land that the outdoors, that's very, very important to me, and nature, you know, we have bunnies, and squirrels, and birds, and deer, and I just, I love that. I feel like I have everything I need that feeds my soul right here in one spot. Homeworthy, it was so nice having you drop by, and now I'm going to get back to my studio and do a little work. Bye. Thanks for watching. Be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content, shopping guides, and so much more.