Schultz Frances - The Bee Cottage story: how I made a muddle of things and decorated my way back to happiness

Copyright 2015 by Frances Schultz

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DESIGN

Janice Shay/Pinafore Press

Photographs by:

Trevor Tondro

Tria Giovan (top left)

James W. Reid (wedding photo)

Courtesy Eleanor Larsen and John Jenkins (Clark Family Photo)

Gina Stollerman

Missy Frey (top)

Aaron Delesie

Anne Mayo Evans

Remaining photos were taken or provided by the author.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Anna Christian

Cover watercolor by Frances Schultz

ISBN: 978-1-63220-495-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-63220-864-4

Printed in China

To Duvall, who knows the Bee Cottage story and all my other stories, too.
Thank you for listening, my darlin sister,
I love you to the moon.

And to my husband Tom, our story is just begun.

Contents

He who loves an old house

Never loves in vain

How can an old house

Used to sun and rain,

To lilac and to larkspur

And an elm above,

Ever fail to answer

The heart that gives it love?

Isabel Fiske Conant

Foreword

T he editors of House Beautiful magazine have always believed in the power of homenot simply the value of owning a house but the satisfaction that comes from decorating and living in a beautiful, personal place.

When contributing editor Frances Schultz asked if we would be interested in doing a decorating story on a little house she had recently purchased, I immediately said yes. But at the time, Frances was only what I would describe as occupying the house. She hadnt really made it her own. Her visions for the rooms were just starting to take shape, and the spectacular outdoor living room was still on the drawing board.

We love a great story as much as we love a beautiful room. So, instead of waiting for a typical full-on, final ta-da feature, I asked Frances if she would share the renovation and decorating process through a yearlong column. Our readers loved it. Frances has a passion for decorating with the eye of an artist. She packed Bee Cottage, as well as the column, with so many great decorating tips and ideas. Honestly, her column became such a special part of the magazine that it left a gaping hole when it ended.

Little did I know, though, that Frances had much more to tell. And the full story is here. Like other great memoirists M.F.K. Fisher, Frances Mayes, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Karen Blixen come to mindFrances has written a book that is more than just another memoir. She tells a very personal story filled with experiences that are, for better or worse, universal and familiar to many. Most people would never expect that decorating a room and making a home could be therapeutic, even healing. But the renovation and decoration of Bee Cottage is a story about the pursuit of happiness through the art of decorating rooms and the power of making life pretty.

Newell Turner,

Editor in Chief,

House Beautiful

Bee Cottage before it became Bee Cottage. A bit run-down, it had curb appeal but not much love. I felt a bit that way myself.

Chapter 1

A House, A Heartbreak, and How Did I Get Here?

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Bren Brown

I d planned to make Bee Cottage the perfect place to begin my second marriage. Id bought it with my fiancs blessing. It was great for us and for his two sons. Though the house was old and needed work, I relished the prospect. If only Id been as optimistic about the marriage, but the story of Bee Cottage begins, Im sorry to say, with heartbreak.

After the wedding invitations were sent, after gifts received, after the ridiculously expensive dress made, after deposits paid, after a house bought... I called it off. I wish I could say he was a jerk and a cad, but he wasnt. He was and is a great guy. For purposes of our story I will call him G. The relationship failed because we just were not a fit.

And there I was with a house and the dawning that everything I had dreamed it would be would now be something else entirely. I cried, I hid, I hated myself. I stared at the walls, gazed forlornly at the non-existent garden, moped at the fifty-year-old refrigerator, sighed at the stove that didnt work, and fretted over the roof that needed replacing...

Looking back, I reckon many of us get to a place like this at some time or other, a spot that illuminates the space between where we are and where we thought wed be. Sometimes an illness or loss jabs us into awareness of what we havent done, where we havent been, who we havent become. But for many of us it isnt as clear as a single momentous event. It is more a culmination of experiences that turn out differently from how we expected in a sort of climax of existential mission-creep.

In my Great Muddle of 2008, I had more questions than answers. One answer I did have, though, was that I loved this rundown little house with the blue shutters and the quirky rooms. I loved what it could be. I knew (more or less) what to do with itmore than I could claim in other areas of my life. I wondered if I could pull the houseand my lifeback together at the same time. I would find love again, I told myself, and when I did I would give it a good home.

In my sea of fear, self-loathing, and self-doubt, amid heaps of mistakes and missteps, the belief that I could make the house lovely and welcoming, that this was something I might get right, gave me a glimmer of confidence and a glimpse of joy. My desire to create a beautiful, harmonious environment was a place of clarity for me in an emotional morass. Embracing that desire began to bring me around to who I was and what I could be. It was a point of light in a big dark room, but it was something.

A grapevine-covered pergola off the dining room may have been original to the house, judging from the size of the vines trunk.