G Home: Home Grown

Standing barefoot in the middle of her brightly accented screened porch, Katie Kern’s brown eyes narrow as she slips a finger to her lips. “Y’all want to see my butterfly farm?” she asks as an endearing smile spreads across her face. With that, she’s off, her crisp bob bouncing as she pushes open the back door, passes the six-foot-tall, four-tiered bubbling fountain and squats in her dark blue jeans and black T-shirt next to a collection of three small pots occupying a corner of her red cobblestone patio. “My favorite place in the world is the swing on the terrace at the end of a long day,” she says from a comfy spot in her sprawling garden, bursting with vibrant flowering bushes and creeping vines, plus a smattering of evergreens. “Everybody needs a little outside time, and this is where I go to find mine.”

At first, it’s hard to see what’s so exciting. Sprigs of verdant parsley push toward the early autumn sun. Tall, gangly stems of rosemary protest against a net that covers the top and three sides. But at the end of Katie’s pointed finger is the farm’s current sole inhabitant: a brilliant green caterpillar resting motionless in perfect camouflage on a rosemary branch. Containers filled with parsley, the water from the fountain, and a nearby purple butterfly bush together create a perfect habitat for attracting and raising butterflies, she says.

“This guy right here is ready to go into his chrysalis. Isn’t that fun?”
The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. It’s hard to deny Katie’s energy as she bounds over her home’s immaculate wood floors, trailed by both tail-wagging Lacey, a seven-year-old golden retriever she and her husband, Michael, got from a rescue in Charlotte, and squirmy Anna, an eleven-year-old dachshund-sized mutt Katie brought home from the Humane Society.

“Katie has a glow about her, an energy that is very contagious and something people want to be around and enjoy being in the company of. Obviously, I met her and had that first reaction, as well. I just knew she was a very special, one-of-a-kind person,” says Michael, who met Katie in 2003. They were married the next year, sold their individual houses and soon began looking for a home together.

“We looked all over town,” Katie recalls, sitting at the kitchen table, Lacey and Anna lolling at her feet. They considered newer and older homes, but none fit. They envisioned enough room for Michael’s children from his first marriage: twenty-six-year-old Hayley and twenty-three-year-old twins Neil and Matt, even though they were all off at school at the time. But when their real estate agent suggested the spacious Cobblestone development, she couldn’t get past the front entrance, which was, at the time, impassable.

“I could just see some houses in the distance. I said, ‘Phhtt, whatever,’ ” she explains with a wave of her hand. Eventually, however, her agent convinced her a return visit would be worth it to see a house Galloway Custom Homes had under way. It was about 80 percent done at the time, and they loved it instantly, Katie says.

They were the first family to move into the new neighborhood and they’ve never looked back: “We just didn’t find what we wanted until we came here,” she says of the home that is now on the Greenville Symphony Guild Tour of Homes.

Since then, they’ve spent the past four years investing hundreds of hours in the details, from selecting the dark-wood cabinetry and the burnished copper fixtures to painting, painting, painting, from the serene blue-and-gold faux finish on the master bedroom walls to the brick-and-stone pattern, reminiscent of a wine cellar, on the arched hallway between the kitchen and dining room. “I wanted something that was very warm and a house that tended to be lived in versus looked at,” explains Michael, who owns twenty Long John Silvers and A&W franchises in eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and the Upstate.

From the moment you walk up the brick stairs and pass through the soaring wood-and-glass front doors, the space is imbued with life and European styling that invites you to savor a Puccini aria over a glass of great Barolo. A large wooden mantel the color of butter frames a fireplace that anchors the broad great room. The black-and-white coffered ceiling offers contrasting symmetry as plush sofas and intimate nooks invite relaxation. Though bright light streams through windows overlooking the couple’s screened-in porch and lily- and rose-filled back garden, the chocolate-colored walls and Italian-inspired paintings offer a tempting coziness.

“I have to live with things before I get inspired, so this has been a four-year job,” Katie says. But she is no décor novice. After growing up in Greenville, she began studying interior design at Winthrop University and went on to earn an art history degree from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Instead of immersing herself in the world of interior design, however, she decided to pursue a career in education, began teaching, and earned her master’s at Augusta State University in Georgia. Now she works from home as a salesperson for Pearson Curriculum Professional Development, a company offering professional development materials to school systems.

“I love interior design as a hobby, and that’s what it is for me,” she demurs. But Michael says buying and furnishing the home let Katie’s talent and creativity shine. “She would take me to the paint store, pick out thirty color swatches, and put six in her hand at a time and say, ‘Pick the one you like the most and the one you like the least.’ ” She repeated the process, almost as if conducting an elaborate card trick, until they funneled their choices down to a manageable group.

“Then she would build a huge poster board for every room and clip on swatches of paint colors, samples of materials, and fabrics,” Michael says. “She would lay them out in the exact order the rooms were laid out in the house,” he says. “You could really appreciate and react to how one room would lay out and how it would play off of the other rooms in the house. Sure enough, it came together like snapping pieces of a puzzle.”

Like some of the best puzzles, a few pieces are bound to surprise. Lest the couple be taken too seriously, they keep a toy trunk in the great room stuffed with plush toy animals for the dogs. Subtle animal motifs spread whimsy throughout the home—from the delicate songbirds on the entranceway mirror to a unicorn on the bedroom tapestry.

The two also luxuriated in finding unexpected design inspiration from locations as far away as Brazil to locales as familiar as Landrum. A large tapestry of a woman surrounded by garden animals hangs on a bedroom wall, a piece bought during a trip to the Belgian city of Bruges. A bejeweled parrot, whose colors pulsate from its perch atop a large cabinet in the great room, came home with the couple after a trip to Brazil.

In Boston, a window-shopping stroll led them to an antiques store that held a prancing thirty-four-inch Bacchus bronze by the French artist E. Chrétien and a hand-painted pedestal by Verne Martin depicting eighteenth-century figures strolling in a garden. The pair now greet visitors from a spot in the entryway, where a pair of antique Indian garden gates found at a store in nearby Landrum hang high on a lofted wall.

“You don’t go out shopping locally and say, ‘We’re going to buy a piece of art to go there,’” Michael says. “As you travel, you have in mind these certain places in the house that need a piece of art, that need to be finished, and I’m just going to keep my eye open.”

Though Katie is the artist of the household, Michael is frequently a source of advice and inspiration. With an MBA from Vanderbilt University and fifteen years of experience in advertising and marketing in the corporate sector before starting his own small business, he admits that Katie has sharpened his artistic eye. And he has returned the favor, Katie says: “He pushes me to try things I maybe wouldn’t. Like when I was doing the dining room ceiling, he helped paint the base coat. I was doing the gold leaf in a traditional way, lining up the leaves side-by-side. He came in and said, ‘Uh, I think that’s too perfect.’ ”

Now, the gold-and-red ceiling adds a punch of color in the dining room, which is decorated with a bronze dragon and an Oriental rug found on eBay, another source of Katie’s one-of-a-kind finds. “I’ll try something that I think is creative, and I’ll think, ‘OK, it’s there,’ but then he’ll question me in a way that makes me go beyond the original idea. In the past, I would have just stopped with my own design.”

Those design ideas are expanding, and she began dabbling in jewelry design about a year ago. “What I want is a creative outlet that I can give back with,” she says, taking a box of beads from a shelf in her kitchen. Garnet, abalone shells, and Swarovski pearls fill her long, asymmetrical necklaces, and the sunlight makes the strands shimmer in her hands. “I always try to find balance in my life―mind, body, and spirit,” she says. If her jewelry takes off, she plans to donate 50 percent of her profit to causes benefiting mothers, children, and animals.

Suddenly, sixteen-year-old Mollie grunts from her cushions in the laundry room, sending Katie running for the pug, her third and oldest pet. Cradling Mollie in her arms, Katie carries her out the screened porch when the doting mother spots something crawling on the cool tile floor.

“Oh, my gosh,” Katie says, peals of laughter ringing through the house. “Look what I found!” A bright green caterpillar, crawling across the screened porch as if it couldn’t bear to be away from Katie.

“What are you doing in here?” she says, scooping up the insect, letting it crawl over her palm and up her arm until she can find a spot for it on the rosemary. Standing up, she sees another green wiggle, this time from a patch of mulch bordering her kitchen window, sending Katie into more fits of laughter. That makes three caterpillars she’s found a home for this day.

Again, she plucks the insect and delicately places it onto a curly parsley leaf where it, just like the life she and Michael are building together in their European-inspired home, can continue to grow.