In Living Color
Salem artists and gallery owners build their home around gallery layouts and nature-themed art.
Written by Jennifer Dirks
Photography by Greg Kozowa
Aristotle once said, “Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish.” Had it not been for art, this Salem hillside might still be overrun by poison oak.
Signe and Gary Lawrence had spent a year house hunting. Yet they “couldn’t find an existing home that would fit our art collection,” said Gary Lawrence, who started collecting 40 years ago and now co-owns two art galleries with his wife.
Paintings and sculptures gathered over the years had barely been viewed -- tucked down narrow hallways or stored where the couple couldn’t get back to look at them. “We saw it in the gallery when we first acquired it, but we hadn’t seen it since,” he said.
So the couple purchased this half-acre lot 30 miles from their Salem gallery, and spent the next year as architects, general contractors and builders for the new home.
“This house is a product of evolution,” said Lawrence, who used off-the-shelf blueprints to start. “We eliminated walls, shortened walls, lengthened a few, and we did that by walking around, making chalk lines, envisioning the space, even after the roof was on.”
After countless building revisions, the Lawrence’s now have a 3,000-square-foot residential version of their Salem and Portland art galleries. This version also includes outdoor spaces for sculptures and creativity-inspiring water features.
“The driving force was building a home for us that we’d be comfortable in, that we’d like to live in,” said Lawrence, gazing at Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson through giant windows. “But also equally important – even more so at times – was a home that would display our art collection.”
Start to finishes
To create art space, Lawrence widened hallways enough so people could stand back to look at larger pieces. The main hallway to the guest bathroom and bedrooms, for instance, garnered an extra 18 inches stolen from the kitchen.
“It created a mini gallery for that area,” Lawrence said. “We found we could reduce the kitchen area by a foot and a half – moving the kitchen island and things of that nature – to accommodate. It really didn’t affect the kitchen much, but it gave us a lot more space to showcase art.”
On the walls, and in the halls, went bronze sculptures by Georgia Gerber, mixed-media landscapes by Hans Schiebold, woodland watercolors by Yiqian Shu, and dozens of other pieces created by Northwest artists. Each piece carries a nature theme, or uses products found in nature.
In the dining room is a massive four-panel woodscape by Shu, a master artist who immigrated to Portland five years ago from Shanghai. “I’ve been in the business for 25 years selling artwork,” Lawrence said, “and I’ve only seen a few that are four-panels wide.” He had to have it.
To play up this and other pieces, the house is laid out and lit like a gallery interior. Sheetrock walls are painted white, floors are laid with tongue-and-groove hardwood, and ceilings are studded with low-voltage halogen lights.
“The electrician told me that we had enough wiring in the house that he would normally put in three houses. But we had to have control of all the lights.”
It took a walk in the half-finished house for Lawrence to drill the electrician’s meaning home: “Before they put the sheetrock on and the insulation, you could see all the wiring running through the walls and ceiling -- from the lights, the sound system, the alarm system. It looked like you were living in a bowl of spaghetti. Just lots and lots of wires.”
Track lights are placed over every piece of art. All of the lights are controlled by sliding dimmer switches “so we can show all the artwork with just the right amount of light -- at any time, night or day,” Lawrence says. “We even lit the floor in the house with 85 can lights.”
Floor-aimed lights give an angel’s glow to Brazilian cherry floors. “A lot of people don’t go with dark floors like that -- they go with the oaks and the maples,” said Christina Bird, the Contract Furnishing Mart salesperson who handled Lawrence’s floors and counters. “But when you go with a very dark floor like this, it’s just a really rich look.”
First things first
The addition of nature-themed art isn’t the only thing that gives this house personality. The house gets its cultured edge from its accessories.
Take the glass pedestal in the powder room. “The first thing we actually bought for the house is that glass sink,” Lawrence said. “It looks like green coke bottle glass, and it’s as if some giant pushed his fist into the flat glass and formed the sink.”
The bowl sits on a U-shaped glass pedestal. A mirror, formed to fit around plumbing inside the glass pedestal, reflects back into the room. “So you’re seeing through the glass, but not seeing the plumbing,” Lawrence said.
Or take the four granite bowl sinks, two in the master bathroom and two in the guest bathroom (The sinks retail $550 each). Each is carved from a solid block of granite, polished inside and on top and hand chipped on the outside. The rough, hand finished exterior is exposed by floating the bowl four inches above the counter. Ornamental balls, also carved granite, sit on the counter itself.
Even the faucets are works of art: “The faucets are like little sculptures that are throughout the house,” Lawrence said. For instance, the faucet on the glass sink is a 4-inch-wide waterfall faucet.
The crowning touch is a newly completed nature-themed front door. Images of sailboat sails are cut from sheet metal and tacked to the door with stainless steel and brass screws. This front-door vignette comes thanks to Gig Harbor, Wash., sculptor Tom Torrens. (Torrens’ doors, ranging $2,500 to $5,000, were featured in American Style magazine.)
“We did a personal approach on this door,” Torrens said. “Gary was into sailing, and his wife Signe is into mountains. So I combined those two images, with a mountain range and a series of sail forms” -- made of sheet titanium, stainless steel, copper, brass and a patinaed copper mountain.
“In designer homes, the main focus is generally the front door,” Torrens said. “So we pick up on that, and use the door to immediately bring in an artistic format.”
So why all this nature-themed art? “It’s probably our upbringing,” says wife Signe Lawrence. “We both grew up in rural areas, and mountainous areas, and love nature, and feel comforted by it. Our favorite thing is to get out in the woods. We think it brings beauty into our lives.”
As Aristotle also said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
SOURCES: Designer: John Gross Interior Design/Petra Geiling; Truss Engineer: Doug Enger; Original floor plan: Alan Mascord Design Associates; Faucets: George Morland Plumbing; Kitchen appliances: KitchenAid Stainless Steel Architect-Series refrigerator, Décor cook top; Counters: Verde butterfly granite from Marble Center; Glass sink: CHOWN Hardware; Flooring: Pre-finished Kelly-Goodwin Co. Brazilian Cherry floors, through Contract Furnishing Mart.