STORY OF A HOUSE
Pretty as a
Picture
Artist’s home captures bygone America By Deborah Salomon Photographs by John Gessner
M
onet painted from a studio adjacent to his country home in Giverny. Van Gogh rented four Spartan rooms in Arles, which he immortalized on canvas. Cézanne built a studio on farmland, in Provence. All painted fruit and flowers in the still life mode. During the late 19th century, the ateliers of a hundred starving artists dotted the Left Bank. How they would covet Carmen Drake-Gordon’s set-up: a 100-year-old farmhouse converted as a studio with 14-foot windows facing north, for consistent light. Close by, a new house that appears 100 years old, with elongated porch, furnished in country antiques. Beyond the house, an idyllic pond, where Muscovy ducks swim and catfish jump for treats. A shady chicken coop; a fenced yard for three goats who earn their keep by clearing the wisteria. A red barn workshop where Carmen’s partner, Wade Owens, a multi-skilled retired Army officer from Iowa, builds, repairs and blacksmiths. Between the studio and farmhouse, raised beds yield kale, peppers, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, paw-paws and jujubes. Then, for whimsy, an adorable outhouse with running water built by Carmen’s children, instead of installing a septic system for her studio. “I call it my Pee Palace,” she says and laughs. All this surrounded by 15 acres of grass, woods and wildlife where she walks with Dean, a devoted mixed-breed dog she rescued minutes before euthanasia.
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PineStraw
The Art & Soul of the Sandhills
