G Home: Artists in Residency

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Artists in Residency

G Home

When fourteen-year-old Emily and twelve-year-old Caroline Vermillion were just little girls, they settled in front of a low, black bench, dipping brushes to paint the colors of the rainbow. On one part, Caroline painted a garden of tiny, delicate flowers beneath orange and purple polka dots. Emily, already a lover of horses, painted a group of galloping yellow, white, orange, and red horses led by a little girl across the seat.

This bench quickly became one of the family’s most beloved pieces of furniture, says their mom, Melisa Holmes. Today it holds a place of honor in the home’s front foyer, greeting everyone who visits the family that also includes dad Steve Vermillion and three-year-old Ella. “I love that bench,” Melisa says. “It will always be in my house.”

The seat is a perfect introduction into this home of creatives. Mixing whimsy and charm, the piece is a harbinger of the décor to come in the 3,500-square-foot farmhouse unmistakably filled with a love for the arts—from the folk-art-covered walls to the wide front porch (complete with comfy rocking chairs) to the backyard designed to host bonfires and music-filled gatherings. Bright, open, colorful. “We’re not real formal people,” Steve says. “We like muddy shoes and dogs. And lots of kids.”

That means spaces bursting with personality in a home completed in March 2008 but designed to feel and look as if it had been in this somewhat rural, Simpsonville community, Bruce Farms, for decades. The idea for the space got legs in Virginia, when the two doctors met at The Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, while Steve was a student and Melisa was a resident. In 1993, they were married.

“(We) were always taken with old farmhouses out in the country,” Melisa says, especially one house in particular they found in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The family considered building in Charleston, where they had lived and remodeled nearly five homes. But they decided, instead, to move to Greenville in 2005 to find space in the country and build their dream home. They began looking for property, found nearly four acres in Simpsonville, and took the photo of their Virginia farmhouse to their builder, Brandon Eich of IKE Construction, and their architect, Charlie Slate of AWHS Architects and Planners.

Together, they came up with a simple, family-friendly farmhouse they named “Morning Dew,” designed not only to grow their brood but also spotlight their love of music and folk art. “It was a perfect move for us,” offers Melisa, an Atlanta, Georgia, native who is an ob-gyn at The Village Center for Women at the Village at Pelham. She is also the co-author of two books geared toward helping girls successfully maneuver through adolescence: Girlology: A Girl’s Guide to Stuff that Matters and Hang-Ups, Hook-Ups, and Holding Out.
Today, the family has made room for two dogs, a horse, a rabbit, two miniature donkeys, and, Melisa says, space for her kids to run, ride bikes, and play with all the neighborhood animals. “I like that homegrown feel,” says Steve, a native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, who is a high-risk obstetrician at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center.

Because farmhouses are designed for communal living with open spaces and clean lines, but also afford some privacy with hidden-away nooks, the architectural style perfectly matched the family’s needs. But they also wanted to keep the family close, which included making sure all the bedrooms were together on the second floor. “They were never looking to achieve quantity in mass square footage,” says their builder, Eich, “but rather their goal was to build a home that exuded warmth, cozy spaces, unique niches, and an overall sense of family.”

That meant filling the kitchen with open shelving, white cabinetry, and dark soapstone countertops. Knotty, wormy pine covers the kitchen island, where Melisa and the girls—who all are vegetarians—make homemade pastas like roasted butternut squash and goat cheese ravioli. The same subway tiles that form the kitchen backsplash are found in the home’s bathrooms.

Unembellished crown moldings frame natural pine, tongue-in-grove ceilings. In general, the home feels open and historic, from its tin roof to its reclaimed-pine floors, helped in part by a set of refurbished barn doors found on eBay. “I didn’t want anything fluted, anything frilly,” says Melisa, who also sewed most of the window treatments throughout the home. “I just wanted clean, simple lines.”

“We tried to keep it really simple and not have too much ornamentation on the outside,” says architect Charlie Slate, who worked with the firm’s intern architect, Erin McNicholl, to come up with the home’s plans. “If you look at old farmhouses, you just don’t see a lot of ornamentation on them.”

But simple means anything but boring. The couple’s extensive art collection, gathered over two decades from artists across the country, adorns walls throughout. The first piece the couple bought together—a red-haired, yellow-winged, smiling wooden angel by Alabama artist Lila Graves—soars on the fieldstone fireplace in the great room, which also holds an antique freestanding cabinet dressed with empty anesthesia bottles from the office of Steve’s grandfather, an ear, nose, and throat doctor. “We’ve always loved color and folk art,” Melisa says. “You can’t put folk art in a house that’s really serious. So, it was fun to build a house that it would shine in.”

Making space for their own artistic pursuits proved equally important during the home’s design. Melisa and Steve turned what was going to be an open porch off the master bedroom into a painting studio for Melisa, who, as an undergrad at the University of Georgia, majored in drawing and painting. Her watercolor and acrylic paintings also dot the home’s walls, and include a fantastical red and orange horse painting, hanging in Ella’s room close to the tent where the bubbly three-year-old plays with stuffed animals and reads her favorite book, Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, with her mom and dad.

Melisa still paints when she gets a chance, she says, and the studio (along with the kitchen) is one of her favorite places in the house. “I just love what I can do in there,” she says of her studio. “It can be messy and it doesn’t matter.”

Making space for creativity was, in part, the idea behind the girls’ rooms, too. A young actress who frequently appears in productions at the South Carolina Children’s Theatre, Caroline has filled her room with theater-inspired pieces, from mannequins and trunks of costumes to a stage, complete with black curtains and a mural hand-painted by local artist and set designer, Kim Granner. Emily’s room reflects her lifelong infatuation with all-things-equestrian. Iconic horse items, from stuffed animals, sketches, and statues to a grapevine wreath draped with ribbons she’s earned during competition, punctuate the space. She can even see horses at a nearby farm from her bedroom window. “I’m very lucky that both of my older daughters have found something they’re passionate about,” Melisa says.

Just like mom and dad, though, the daughters are as passionate about music as they are about art. “Music’s always been a part of our lives,” Melisa says. The family makes yearly pilgrimages to music festivals, including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado, and the walls in the home’s music room are covered with folk art paintings of music legends, including Elvis Presley, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Garcia.

With Melisa playing the banjo, Emily playing the mandolin, and Caroline playing the guitar, various string instruments are propped on one end of the room, while a piano Melisa’s parents bought when she was just a baby sits front and center. Just above the piano hangs a prized possession—an old guitar signed by all the members of the Grateful Dead, who Steve saw more than fifty times during his college years.

Though the family loves bluegrass, the Grateful Dead fills the CD player as much as any. Even the kids know most of the lyrics, Steve says, and Ella’s now the owner of the “Jerry doll,” a floppy Jerry Garcia that boasts his signature wire-rimmed glasses and has part of its right middle finger missing. A few of the family pets received Grateful Dead-inspired names, including the rabbit, Jerri, named for Jerry Garcia, and Emily’s horse, Cosmic Charlie, named for a favorite song. The farm’s name is the title of another favorite song. “They know that their dad—when he was not so nerdy and old—was into that stuff,” Steve laughs.

Still harkening to their folk roots, the Vermillions invented various ways to turn their abode into a private music-festival venue, including building a covered barbecue area and stage they call the “Bluegrass Shed” in the backyard, which also has sets of Adirondack chairs clustered around a fire pit. “We spend a lot of time in the backyard when it’s warm,” Melisa says.

It’s easy to see why. With a huge back porch and doors from the great room that open up to acres of rolling hills, it’s like having their own private field festival just off the back lawn. “We wanted people to walk in and feel warm and welcomed,” Steve says—a place where friends and family can gather and relax. “This is a place that they don’t have to worry about stepping on the carpets.”
Or on toes, for that matter.