The Bee Cottage Story

by Frances Schultz

  Copyright © 2015 by Frances Schultz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  DESIGN

  Janice Shay/Pinafore Press

  Photographs by:

  Trevor Tondro 2, 6, 9, 29, 64, 76, 77 (plates), 78, 80 (“after”), 82 (right, bench), 83, 86, 87, 94, 96-97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 129, 130 (“after”), 133, 134, 137 (left), 138, 145, 148, 149 (top right and bottom left), 150 (top), 155

  Tria Giovan 81, 82 (left, fireplace), 84, 88-89, 99 (top), 142, 149 (top left)

  James W. Reid 16 (wedding photo)

  Courtesy Eleanor Larsen and John Jenkins 32 (Clark Family Photo)

  Gina Stollerman 59

  Missy Frey 146 (top)

  Aaron Delesie 156

  Anne Mayo Evans 158

  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

  Foreword by Newell Turner

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

  2 Childhood to Child Bride

  3 The Single Years

  4 Nowhere Good

  5 The Big C

  6 Mama

  7 Daddy

  8 Buying a House in the Hamptons

  9 A New Beau, an Old Pattern

  10 Another Loss

  11 Finding the House, Losing the Marriage

  12 Seeking a New Path

  13 Detour

  14 How Bee Came to Be

  15 You Have to Start Somewhere

  16 First Steps: From the Outside In

  17 The Living Room

  18 The Garden Room

  19 Tom Samet to the Rescue

  20 The Dining Room and Library

  21 The Kitchen and Butler’s Pantry

  22 The Master Bedroom

  23 The Study and Sometimes Guest Room

  24 The Guest Suite

  25 The Pergola

  26 The Garden

  27 Collections

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  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

  The editors of House Beautiful magazine have always believed in the power of home—not 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 hadn’t 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 mind—Frances 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. —Brené Brown

  I’d planned to make Bee Cottage the perfect place to begin my second marriage. I’d bought it with my fiancé’s 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 I’d been as optimistic about the marriage, but the story of Bee Cottage begins, I’m 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 wasn’t. 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 didn’t 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 we’d be. Sometimes an illness or loss jabs us into awareness of what we haven’t done, where we haven’t been, who we haven’t become. But for many of us it isn’t 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 it—more than I could claim in other areas of my life. I wondered if I could pull the house—and my life—back 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 vine’s trunk.

  The original kitchen door.

  In many ways mine is the story of any decorating project, fraught with ups and downs and fits and starts. What surprised me was how the decorating process became both metaphor and means for personal discovery, and ultimately, for healing. I came to see how inherent in my love for decorating were the very insights and analogies that loosened the knots in my spirit. I think this holds true for everyone, be their passion for sport, art, literature, science, cooking, or teaching—whatever the calling, career, or hobby. All are rife with metaphors that point to our particular truths and what is authentic for us as individuals.

  Like the Chinese saying about the longest journey beginning with one small step, so it was with Bee Cottage in beginning to hear my heart’s song. This is the story of that process, soul-searching illustrated. I hope you’ll find useful information here based on my years of experience with, and writing about, design for magazines, books, and my own blog, FrancesSchultz.com. I’m merely sharing my story and hoping something resonates with you if you find yourself in a similar place. Which I hope you don’t. But if you do, whether it’s a new house or a new chapter in your life (they often go together), my advice is to start from where you are, and begin with what you know. Because at the end of the day, that is all any of us have. And guess what? It’s enough.

  There was a small brick terrace at the back.

  Trees and hedges were overgrown and out of control.

  Chapter 2

  Childhood to Child Bride

  Age 2 and topless, Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, where we spent every summer growing up.

  I was born into a big extended family in a small Southern town. Our family was, and is, involved in farming, business, and some politics, and was prominent by our Tarboro, North Carolina, standards. My mother was a debutante and my father a dashing Army pilot. She had a thing for pilots. He had a thing for girls. It lasted long enough to have my sister and me. He had left the Army to return to Tarboro with my mother, but after they separated, he went back into the Army and pretty much out of our lives. This, I think, was my mother’s preference, and suffice to say she had her reasons.

  A handsome groom and his beaming bride, Trigg Brown and I just married and exiting the beautiful old Calvary Episcopal Church in Tarboro.

  Mama remarried in 1969, again to a pilot, this time a Marine. We moved around a lot as military families do, returning to Tarboro during his 13-month tour in Vietnam, and returning again for good when he retired around 1978. By then I was away at school, the fifth generation of my family to attend St. Mary’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the first to go to the University of Virginia. (Everybody else had gone to UNC except Mama, who was reportedly given the choice between Duke and Vassar because Carolina was “too wild.” She chose Duke undoubtedly to be nearer the wild.) When I was in my third year at UVa I met a tall, handsome boy, an alum and a few years older than I. I was mad for him. That he reminded me so much of my mother’s brother, my Uncle “Dubba,” was not lost on me either.

  The reception was in the garden at home, with the cake in my mother’s beautiful dining room, with silver foil-backed grass cloth on the walls and that wonderful Clarence House chintz. The chandelier was made by the erstwhile Edward F. Caldwell Co. in New York and is similar to those he made for the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. My sister has it in her dining room today.

  I was crazy about Dubba—everybody was. The quintessential Southern gentleman but with a twinkle in his eye that belied a glint of mischief, he was elegant but unaffected, part good ol’ boy and part Cary Grant. As both my father and stepfather were absent most of my life, Dubba was my by-default paternal figure, and much beloved. I didn’t consciously see my Virginia beau as a father figure, but Sigmund Freud would have. Anyway, we married the fall after I graduated and made our home in Richmond, Virginia.

  Age 3, I’m the little chubby-legged one in the middle, as flower girl in my cousin and godmother Caroline Clark Trask’s wedding.

  One thing I never had to worry about was becoming a Rockette. I peaked at age 7 in Miss Bobbie’s dance school in Tarboro, ca. 1964. I am the snaggle-toothed one second from left.

  The year was 1980. I was twenty-two and saw myself as a career girl. Marriage wasn’t on my agenda then, but he was ready, and he proposed. He also made it clear in the nicest way that if I said no, he would move on, and I didn’t want to let him go. After six years we grew apart, and we did let go, in 1986. I adore him to this day. We rarely see each other, but we talk. He’s been my stockbroker for thiry-five years. Twenty-five years after we divorced, he came to my mother’s funeral. God bless him.

  On a Grand Tour of Europe with my bestie Anne Louise Mayo Evans. No backpacks for us. Even as teenagers, we knew packing light was overrated.

  Sketching from a mokoro, in Botswana’s Okavango Delta / Out for a ride on my sister and brother-in-law’s farm in Newnan, Georgia./ Trekking in Nepal.

  Chapter 3

  The Single Years

  After the divorce I wanted to spread my wings, travel, and be independent. For the next two years I did just that, making my way through Africa, Europe, Asia, and South America. It was wonderful, and I managed to eke out the odd freelance writing assignment now and again, while keeping journals and sketchbooks along the way. In 1989 I moved to Atlanta, and I lived there longer than I’ve lived anywhere until I moved to New York. Atlanta still feels like home when I visit, but I’d always wanted to live in New York. By then I was writing for Veranda magazine and they assigned me the title of “New York Editor,” which I thought was pretty swell. So I went in 2000 and watched the Twin Towers burn a year later almost to the day. Something about that horrible day cemented me as a New Yorker and, I believe, brought all New Yorkers together in a way I haven’t experienced before or since. Being there, living through that, was a defining moment for all of us.

  Soon after I moved to New York, Turner South asked me to host their weekly TV show, Southern Living Presents, based on the popular magazine of the same name. Doing television was fun for me and came naturally, because I am a ham at heart. I loved it. The funny thing is I also kept writing for Veranda. It seems that every time I try to get away from writing, something happens to bring me right back to it.

  On the romantic front, there were twenty-plus years of mostly serial monogamy spiced with the occasional madcap affair. (I once flew into the African Bush to meet a man from Texas on a hunting safari—for our second date.) With a few exceptions, my boyfriends were really good people. (Okay the hunter dude in Africa was a little crazy, but he didn’t count as a boyfriend.) Some of them proposed. I wasn’t consciously avoiding marriage, but obviously some part of me was. Was I just avoiding commitment? Yes. Was I always looking for something better? Probably. Or for something that didn’t exist? Also probably. Would I have known the right man if I’d tripped over him? Definitely not. Besides, I was having such a good time. Or so I told myself. And yet . . .

  With so much good-time-having and devil-may-caring and on-and-off-airplaning, it is a wonder I ever got any work done. What is not a wonder is that I didn’t know myself very well.

  While I was out all those years making such an effort to be who I thought I was supposed to be, I forgot to be who I was.

  I was so caught up in living an image of myself as the fabulous, achieving, intrepid Independent Woman that I didn’t know who she was when the bags were unpacked and there was—God forbid—downtime.


  I know there are women who’ve poured their energy into raising families while building careers who also emerge in their mid-forties feeling adrift, or like pieces of their soul had been pinched in the striving, the surviving, the success-making. They have families and communities to show for it (which I note not without envy), but they too pay a price. I had a well-worn passport, treasured experiences, malaria, and herpes.

  While I was out all those years making such an effort to be who I thought I was supposed to be, I forgot to be who I was. Once when I lived in Atlanta one of the attendants at the vet where I sometimes boarded my dogs left me a phone message. She apparently thought she had hung up when she carried on talking to her coworkers . . . about me. Words to the effect of “She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, blah blah blah.” Perhaps there was some jealousy involved. After all, here I was flying off to Paris or somewhere with what (to her) might have been enviable frequency. But I was none of her damn business, and who was she to judge me? Still, it was hurtful to think I was perceived in this way by someone who knew me so superficially. And deep down, I suppose, I feared she had a point. I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what I wanted. I was in such a whirlwind I couldn’t feel the breeze. I’d created so much noise I couldn’t hear my own heart.

  Lifeboat drill! Melissa Biggs Bradley, founder and CEO of the travel website Indagare; journalist Stephen Drucker, moi, and Karon Cullen, former head of public relations for Ritz-Carlton. We met on this cruise press trip around 1996 and remain friends to this day. /

  At a friend’s party in Portugal.

  A one-sheet from a television show idea called Let There Be Style. It never got past the pilot, but it was great fun doing it.

  Atlanta gave me great opportunities and good press, too.