As most people rang in 2023 popping Champagne and making resolutions, Michael and Mary Neumann were slaughtering pigs.

“We’re not like a lot of our friends,” says Mary, laughing.

While in many ways the Neumanns are a typical family—four kids (ages 11, nine, six, and two), busy sport schedules, two dogs, and day jobs as owners of two ServiceMaster locations—life on their 40-acre farm in Fallston is anything but average. The Neumanns raise turkeys and ducks for eggs, and chickens for eggs and meat, and recently butchered 67 of the birds as a family. Some people raise an eyebrow at this unconventional way of life but, “It’s cool to have a dialogue with people that this is where your pork chop or your chicken comes from,” says Mary.

The Neumanns purchased the farm in 2021 from Michael’s parents, who had lived there since 1987. The farm’s name, MistyGlen, is both a play on Michael’s parent’s names—“Ms. De” (his mother’s nickname for Diane) and Glenn—and a nod to the mist that gathers in the fields. Those fields are visible from every room in the family’s Williamsburg-revival-style home, which overlooks fields, ponds, and a pool surrounded by perennial borders of native flowers.

Mary grew up in northern Pennsylvania and as a child brought home two chickens from a school hatching project, as well as a one-month-old dairy calf she won.

“The animal life has always been for me,” she says. She adds that it was always their desire to live in a way that rebuffed the conventional food-system model, but during lockdown they became more intentional in their research. Books like The Soil Will Save Us, Beyond Labels, and Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture, sent the couple down the path to regenerative farming.

Based on the principle that healthy soil is the basis of a healthy planet, regenerative farming uses nature’s fertilizer (manure), native plants, and responsible growing processes. Animals are always grass-fed and humanely slaughtered. Eventually the soil heals and feeds itself.

“Our food system has become convenient and fast,” says Michael. “Our current system of monoculture crops and Big Ag is not sustainable and needs to change.”

“Regenerative farming is almost beyond sustainable,” Mary explains. “Regenerative agriculture means leaving the land better and more self-sustaining every year that we’re here.”

Enter the fowl, stage right. The Neumanns focus on raising many endangered heritage breeds, those that can do well with little human intervention. (They’re like the native plants of animals.) They have Heritage Blue Slate turkeys that are sold for meat but also as breeding pairs to preserve the species. Their chickens are a motley crew of Leghorns, Bresse, Ameraucanas, Wyandottes, Marans, Cream Legbars, and Brahmas. The fowl have a coop but spend much of their time free-ranging from two mobile “chicken tractors” that can be moved around the farm, naturally aerating, and fertilizing the ground as they go.

“Everything has a purpose,” Michael says.

The couple is starting small with what Michael calls “the old McDonald method,” of having a little bit of everything. The ducks keep the farm’s two ponds healthy by eating duckweed, which can snuff out native grasses. There are two beehives for pollinators. The Neumanns practice responsible mowing practices, waiting to cut their hayfields until after July 1 to allow nesting ground birds to thrive.

The Neumanns installed no-till garden beds—a key principle of regenerative farming is to leave soil undisturbed to encourage beneficial microorganisms to flourish—where they raise things like carrots.

“We focus on things the kids like and the family will eat and enjoy growing,” says Mary. “That’s a big part of why we do this, for the kids.”

The farm is a family affair. “For us, it’s important to teach our kids and teach the public that you can start where you’re at; this is attainable on a quarter acre,” says Mary.

Although they can’t quite live off the farm, the grocery store is the absolute last place they go for food. It’s the farm first, then local farmers whose practices they know and trust, like Prigel Family Farm, where they purchase dairy. “Not everyone has 40 acres, but others can be aware of what regenerative farming and permaculture are so that they can make informed choices.”

A photographer, Mary catalogues the farm’s adventures and recipes on her Instagram account @MistyGlenFarm, hoping to share the lifestyle of regenerative farming and feed the public’s interest in healthy, sustainable living.

“Others have shown us the importance of more intentional caring for our land and the benefits to doing so, for us and others,” she explains. “I feel so lucky to have a community of like-minded people to surround me in this lifestyle, and wanted to empower and enlighten individuals that may not have that same opportunity.”

The Neumanns are just ramping up their operation. They are painstakingly restoring an 1860s bank barn and plan to move in pigs, followed by cattle and possibly sheep. Animals that intensely graze on small pastures and rotate to different grazing areas frequently are essential in a regenerative farm for natural soil health. Michael envisions the back field converted to a “food forest”—fruit and nut trees—and the front field for the grass-fed animals.

As the second generation of land stewards at the farm, breaking away from the vicious cycle of agribusiness—reap everything off the land, dump fertilizer on it, force crops to grow, reap, repeat—is a deeply personal mission.

“The land is our heritage and our legacy,” says Michael, pointing out that there is less open space in Fallston than when he was young. “We feel the weight of taking care of this little piece of land.”

“Hi, kids,” Lisa Gaskarth calls out as she walks across the yard of her beautiful 60-acre farm in Baltimore County. Three sweet but mischievous faces pop up—goats Poe, The Milk Man, and Gryff—knowing that when Mom appears, it means either treats or a walk in the woods.

Today, it’s the latter, and they follow Gaskarth, clad in overalls, her phone stashed in her back pocket, behind the yellow barn that also houses three horses and a gaggle of chickens and onto a beautiful trail, engulfed by lush green grass and trees, just steps from her home.

It’s been a little less than two years since Gaskarth moved to Slade Run Farm, her own personal oasis tucked down a long, private road. But since so much of that time was swallowed up by the pandemic, she feels like she’s finally getting to open up the windows and let the rest of the world in.

Gaskarth, the owner of Eight Seven Events, an event and wedding planning company, watched everything in her world come to a screeching halt in March 2020, but at least she was able to put all her energy into her new Victorian-style farmhouse, with its delightful wrap-around porch and in-ground pool.

“When we saw this place, it clicked,” says Gaskarth. She had been looking for a farmette—a smaller, 10-12 acre property—but the acreage just spoke to her the minute she saw it. “We couldn’t have possibly dreamed up a better property,” she says.

Although she has a lovely office upstairs, Gaskarth spends hours working from the kitchen table with its perfect view of the barn, alternating between gazing out the window and checking the animals on her video feed. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is warm and inviting, with six-foot-high wainscoting and a beautiful wood-covered ceiling. An empty carton—waiting to be filled with fresh eggs plucked from such fancily named fowl as Narcissa Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, Luna Lovegood, and Professor McGonagall (she’s a Harry Potter fan, needless to say)—sits on the gorgeous granite island.

The whole house is bathed in light, thanks to countless windows, doors, and a sunroom that allows the light to tickle even the farthest corners. Gaskarth grew up in Timonium on land that had once been her family’s farm, Kentucky Stables.

“My dad, his sisters, and their parents ran the farm,” she says. There were lots of horses, and her dad began riding as a kid. “That’s where I got my love of horses,” she explains. She got her first pair of riding boots on her seventh birthday. They now sit on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that’s the centerpiece of the great room. It shares space with other childhood mementos and eccentric pieces of art that bring Gaskarth joy.

Her home is beautiful but comfortable—that rare intersection that means it’s both inviting to her little niece and nephew for playdates, but also can pivot to an adult cocktail party with ease.

“I like neutrals for couches and chairs and beds, big pieces that I can keep for a long time,” she says. “But I really like quirky touches.” She scans the room, her eyes landing on her antique art, floor-to-ceiling arched wood-burning butler stone fireplace, and piano. “I think it’s a little bit farmhouse, a little bit eclectic.”

Gaskarth’s bedoom suite on the first floor—past the “dozy den” featuring a perfect-for-napping oversized couch—is simple, feminine, and warm. The soft and creamy white walls allow her artwork to pop, along with an antique linen dresser tucked in the corner and trunk end tables nestled next to her bed. The real standout of the room is her wall of art.

“I just love a gallery wall,” she admits. “I feel like you can put so much personality into it.” It’s also where she shows off all her finds from treasure hunting with her mom. “Most of these are from antique stores,” she says, gesturing over her bed. There are many pieces, including framed vintage Army pillows from the 1940s, a California license plate to signify a place she once lived, a Wyoming license plate with its bucking horse and rider, and antique riding crops. A gallery wall gives freedom to imperfection. “I like things that don’t have to be exact,” she explains.

She also believes that once you put something on a wall or in a room, it’s not stuck there forever. She loves moving items around within her own home.

“My mom and I have this thing—we say we go shopping in our own house,” she laughs. Anytime she wants to redecorate a room, her first stop is always those boxes she hasn’t quite unpacked yet or even other rooms in the house. There’s nothing that can’t be relocated, including artwork, couches, lamps, and plants.

If Gaskarth’s home’s downstairs is understated and smart with small nods to the farm, upstairs she let herself really lean into equestrian chic. She left the previous owner’s toile horse and hounds wallpaper in one of the bedrooms and made it her own by adding a whitewashed wood-beaded chandelier and bold pillows on the bed. There’s a simple dresser for company, often topped with fresh foliage from her grounds.

The second guest room—“the Ralph Lauren room,” with its iconic plaid quilt, studded headboard, and deep green walls—has two hefty nightstands on either side of the bed. The finds from vintage store Laissez Faire were originally a frothy orange-pink color, so Gaskarth painted them gray, leaving one creamsicle stripe across the top as a playful wink to their original hue.

A few days after she first moved in, Gaskarth’s niece and nephew asked to play with the dollhouse that had been left upstairs by the previous inhabitants near the reading nook—a bookcase filled with color-coordinated tomes next to a bench with a bird’s-eye view of the barn. But when they went to move the little house, they all realized it actually was a laundry chute hidden under the roof. “And then they wanted to play with it even more,” she laughs. “It goes all the way to the basement.”

From the upstairs landing, you can see the home’s two-story foyer, which includes a folksy piece of art depicting the farm, created by an artist at McDonogh School who was the teacher of one of the kids who previously lived there. “It’s an interpretation of the property,” explains Gaskarth. She looks up at the piece. “Cool and quirky,” she says with a laugh. But because it’s all about balance for Gaskarth, there is also a gorgeous antique saddle under the canvas, and a more traditional framed picture of a horse painted by a family member.

And while Gaskarth’s home is pretty perfect, it’s mucking stalls and grabbing a beer from the fridge in her tack room when she feels most at home. She’ll hop on one of her horses, Theo, Maverick, or Valentino, past the peony bush that once belonged to her grandfather, and head out.

Sure, there is still work to be done—a mudroom that needs wallpapering, an office begging for a new coat of paint, dreams to turn the detached garage into a pool house—but, for now, there is just wind in her hair and endless trails ahead.

Artist Stewart Watson remembers the day when she and a group of devoted friends and family had finally finished smashing out the bricked-up windows in the 66,000-square-foot former factory that would eventually be her home. At that moment, Watson knew just what to do in the delightfully bare, cavernous space.

“I roller-skated through the whole place,” says the 48-year-old Watson with a laugh, as she settles down at a dining-room table in the now furnished and decorated space that she lives in with husband Jim Vose. “Part of it was just me being weird.” But there was a practical purpose, too: Roller skates offered the perfect mode of transport to scout out and remove the last errant flooring nails before the place could truly be declared a clean slate. 

Over the course of a decade, Watson and 49-year-old Vose, an architect-turned-sculptor and IT architect, would carve a three-bedroom, two-bath, 3,700-square-foot living space out of an upper floor of the Greenmount West warehouse—that’s only about 6 percent of the massive building—that they and five partners bought for $170,000 15 years ago.

By February 2003, the lower level—once “just full of junk,” says Watson—was cleared and ready for the launch of Area 405, a visual-arts exhibition and event space of which Watson, a co-founder, is executive director. 

By then, the neighborhood and surrounding area had been officially designated as the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Inside the warehouse, studio space for 40 artists would soon follow.

In their living space upstairs, Vose—who Watson endearingly dubs a “sculptitect” for his blend of architectural and sculptural skills—took on the bulk of the design work, with Watson weighing in on the nontechnical. Together, they hoped to create not just a living space for their own family—son Pulman, now 8, was born after they moved in—but one that could also serve as a gathering spot for friends and family, as well as a workspace for the two busy artists. And they were committed to doing all that while staying true to the roots of the building, constructed in 1848 as a brewery and then expanded in the early 1900s and converted to a factory that made industrial machinery and, most recently, venetian blinds. 

That meant tearing out the drop ceilings and wall coverings that had gone up in the 1940s in order to create a factory office of sorts. “We went through 800 pounds of sandblasting material to strip the wood beams and the brick back to something more natural,” says Vose. The result may not be an exact replica of the building’s early days, but “we wanted to show off the structure and bones.” 

Though their artistic media vary—he favors stainless steel, while she sculpts with everything from furnishings to fabric—“we’re both very materially oriented,” says Watson. At every step of the process, “We were thinking about the surfaces we’ve chosen and what to reveal and what necessitated being closed in.” 

Of course, the space held a few surprises (including the petrified raccoon corpse Watson unearthed amid a mountain of man-made debris). Behind the wall in what would become the master bedroom, the couple discovered exterior factory doors that likely had once been used to lift heavy objects into the building. “It was pretty exciting to find things like that and to be able to make sure we incorporated those into the way we thought about our design,” says Watson.

In addition to restoring wood and brick, the two re-glazed all of the 1940s-era windows that survived. 

They re-purposed, too: A long porcelain restroom sink is now a food and water trough for the family’s Great Danes, Ada and Nigel, and wood beams that once secured factory machinery now do duty as a kitchen countertop. Plus, there was a bonus: In addition to the hundreds of thousands of venetian blinds left behind in the building, there was a mother lode of wooden pallets, says Watson. And they were put to use: Several of them were just the right size for the home’s windows. 

Naturally, Watson and Vose also put their own artistic fingerprint on the space. In the gallery-inspired art-filled entry hallway, Vose designed a long curved wall that leads visitors into the main living room. Inside the cavernous main room is another sign of the sculptitect at work: a curvy mini-room Watson calls the kitchen pod. The structure serves to visually divide the living space, while also housing a refrigerator and pantry.    

The home is peppered with works from artist friends and other artists that they admire, but it’s also studded with home furnishings passed down through Watson’s family, from the circa-1880 dining-room table to the framed illustration of a Pullman train car her father salvaged during his days in the railroad industry. 

Hand-me-downs come in handy when you have rooms to fill, Watson says, and here, the practical again merges with the creative. “My work, really since my son was born, has been mining my own family’s objects and trying to find a purpose for them,” says Watson, who often incorporates family belongings into the historically inspired sculptures and installations she creates. 

For now, many of the family treasures that aren’t in direct use have found a temporary home in Watson’s in-home studio, alongside her sewing materials, books, maps, and other tools of the trade. She has been tightly focused on co-creating a historical installation as part of Time & Place, an initiative of the Office of the Arts in Alexandria, Virginia, but she’ll soon likely turn her focus back to family-inspired works. 

The home is peppered with works from artist friends and other artists that they admire, but it’s also studded with home furnishings passed down through Watson’s family, from the circa-1880 dining-room table to the framed illustration of a Pullman train car her father salvaged during his days in the railroad industry. 

Hand-me-downs come in handy when you have rooms to fill, Watson says, and here, the practical again merges with the creative. “My work, really since my son was born, has been mining my own family’s objects and trying to find a purpose for them,” says Watson, who often incorporates family belongings into the historically inspired sculptures and installations she creates. 

For now, many of the family treasures that aren’t in direct use have found a temporary home in Watson’s in-home studio, alongside her sewing materials, books, maps, and other tools of the trade. She has been tightly focused on co-creating a historical installation as part of Time & Place, an initiative of the Office of the Arts in Alexandria, Virginia, but she’ll soon likely turn her focus back to family-inspired works. 

In the years since Watson and Vose moved in, the Station North Arts and Entertainment District has blossomed, as has their artists colony—Area 405—and the building’s studio space (the building is also home to the Station North Tool Library, which is thriving, too). 

In their spare time, the two have in recent years been scouting a summer house to renovate and use as a getaway. “That came out of the fact that our son asked for a backyard for Christmas one year,” says Vose with a laugh. 

As for how such a project would fit into their lives, Watson takes her cues from the past. “It’ll kind of be like how we do everything, which is we just figure it out,” she says. “It’s just intrinsically what a lot of artists do. And stuff is not insurmountable when you have a good partner in crime, which I think is probably my ace in the hole.”

In the years since Watson and Vose moved in, the Station North Arts and Entertainment District has blossomed, as has their artists colony—Area 405—and the building’s studio space (the building is also home to the Station North Tool Library, which is thriving, too). 

In their spare time, the two have in recent years been scouting a summer house to renovate and use as a getaway. “That came out of the fact that our son asked for a backyard for Christmas one year,” says Vose with a laugh. 

As for how such a project would fit into their lives, Watson takes her cues from the past. “It’ll kind of be like how we do everything, which is we just figure it out,” she says. “It’s just intrinsically what a lot of artists do. And stuff is not insurmountable when you have a good partner in crime, which I think is probably my ace in the hole.”

At first glance, Rand Dorman’s home seems like just a riot of stuff.

There are collections of monogrammed silver serving pieces, a bar cart with a half-dozen old seltzer bottles, and an array of typewriters and rotary-dial telephones. The midcentury shelving in the den is loaded with vinyl albums, and nearby is a vintage hi-fi and a plastic Show N’ Tell record player from the ’60s.

The room is a tribute to Dorman’s upbringing a half-century ago, complete with thick shag carpet and a leopard-print sectional sofa with those corduroy tufted throw pillows that have a covered button in the middle. The 50-inch flat screen TV embedded in the wall interrupts the time warp, though Dorman has added a touch of whimsy by perching rabbit-ear antennae on top of the set.

Dorman, whose family runs 76-year-old Dorman’s Lighting in Lutherville, has even wired the old radios and record players to pipe Pandora and iTunes through their speakers. “It’s easy to hook them up,” he says. “But you have to be careful. Some of the old tubes still have electricity in them. I once got a hell of a shock.”

Throughout his Northwest Baltimore home, which he shares with his bulldog Thurber, wherever you turn, your eye falls on something quirky, something familiar from your own childhood or that of your parents or grandparents. In the kitchen, shelves of 1950s- and ’60s-era electric mixers and bright orange and turquoise cookware share space with black lacquered cabinets and a 1958 Tappan oven with an enamel-lined warming drawer. A bubbling chrome coffeepot on the stove sends off an enticing aroma. “The best coffee is percolated,” Dorman insists. “Joe DiMaggio ruined everything.” (He’s referring to the baseball legend’s TV ads for Mr. Coffee drip coffeemakers in the 1970s and ’80s.)

Somehow, these eclectic collections unify. Or maybe it’s just because everything is so impeccably lit.

“I love lighting,” says the 52-year-old. When he enters the house—a modest 1920s bungalow—he need only push a button on his Leviton control system to switch on all the lights. “To turn them on one at a time would take forever and a day,” he says, underscoring the point by gesturing toward the strips of tiny bulbs hidden under the lips of bookshelves, soft lamps on end tables, cove lights in the ceiling, and multiple crystal chandeliers that have all come instantly to life. But none are too bright.

“It’s all on a dimmer,” Dorman points out. “Everything looks beautiful when you can dim the lights.”

At the family business, he frequently instills customers with that ardor for illumination and design that’s in his DNA. Dorman’s grandfather, Gerson, started Dorman’s Electric, a supply company, in 1941. The business, now owned by Gerson’s son, Rand’s uncle Stanley, once had showrooms in Catonsville, Severna Park, Baltimore, and Timonium, but now has a single location on York Road in Lutherville.

The younger Dorman, who eschews a title, works in sales “and whatever is needed,” he says.

At the suggestion of a friend, he recently took over an unused conference room in the store as a mini jumble sale for castoffs and redundancies from his home to keep his personal collection under control. Every time he watches Hoarders on television, he gives away “six or seven lawn-leaf bags of stuff,” he says. The re-purposed room’s recessed lighting now shines down on vintage radios, assorted china, and a bedside lamp in the shape of a bright red purse. “I could see it against a white painted brick wall in some girl’s Canton condo,” he says. His aunt, Linda Michel, has dubbed the space Rantiques. Customers who come into the store for a lamp occasionally find themselves leaving with one of the collector’s knickknacks.

Named by his mother after Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead, Dorman grew up in Owings Mills, attended boarding school in upstate New York, and planned to work in the food service industry.

After studying at Johnson & Wales culinary school in Rhode Island, Dorman began making desserts for Charles Levine Caterers. He recalls getting a raised eyebrow from his boss after a fancy party, when he had taken a break from kitchen duties to dance with a guest, then Sun columnist Laura Charles.

He counts Charles as a friend (she’s also the mother of actor Josh Charles). It was Charles who gifted Dorman the neon “Eat” sign in the kitchen and the buffet in his dining room. A life-size suit of armor stands in the corner, one of the few inauthentic pieces in Dorman’s collection.

“I had to have it—like in Scooby-Doo,” he says. “There’s always a suit of armor.” The piece doesn’t bend, so he and a friend drove it home in a convertible. “You should have seen us,” he says. “The metal parts were flapping in the wind and kids coming home from school were hysterical.”

At home, Dorman’s collections are everywhere. Full sets of gold-rimmed china line shelves in the basement stairwell. He has a particular affinity for obsolete or nearly obsolete products. To wit, he’s bought up containers of 20 Mule Team Borax, Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda, and Brasso polish and glass wax in anticipation of those products permanently disappearing from stores. In the center of the laundry room is an old-fashioned “mangle,” or automatic ironing machine. “You just feed it in and in 30 seconds you have a perfectly ironed king-size sheet,” he says.

He calls the basement the “control center”—it’s home to all the wiring for lighting and sound systems. There’s even a CO2 tank with tubes connected to the contemporary seltzer machine in the kitchen.

So what drives him to embrace all the trappings of yesteryear?

“When I was 5 or 6, I watched old movies on TV—MGM musicals, nightclub scenes, Katharine Hepburn coming down the stairs with a beautiful chandelier hanging above, Clark Gable and Cary Grant dressed for dinner,” Dorman recalls. “I thought life was like that. But something happened around 1968. Cars started getting ugly, clothes started getting ugly. I decided I wanted my life to be like the old movies, that era of fine things—elegance, attention to detail, beauty in everything. But it’s gone. At least in my eyes.”

Dorman, however, has the antidote for that: He just goes home and flicks on the lights.

“I tell you, it was totally liberating,” says Chang Woo Lee.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra associate principal cellist is talking about her move from a 6,026-square-foot house in Guilford to this much smaller 1,613-square-foot home in rural Glenwood in Howard County.

Although Lee describes the downsizing as a major undertaking—she and husband Kirk Laughton sold and donated a majority of their possessions, including a collection of Korean and Japanese antique furniture—she found it surprisingly easy to pare down their belongings to the essentials. “I’m not a sentimental person,” says Lee. “I can be very practical. I say, ‘These are things. I don’t have to keep everything.’”

A sleek design is punctuated by eclectic pieces of art.

Even the bathroom merits art.

“This is the first major antique piece that we purchased, about 35 years ago,” Lee recalls, cradling a 17th century Korean vase in her hands. “It has a lot of character,” she says, running her thumb over brush strokes depicting a full moon. The couple picked up the piece on a trip to South Korea, where Lee was born and lived until she was offered a scholarship from the University of Indiana in 1970 to study with legendary cellist Janos Starker. Her family remains in Korea, save her three children and one nephew, who live in Ellicott City.

On the coffee table, a pair of vibrantly painted Iznik ceramics returned with the couple from a trip to Istanbul. A bronze sculpture of a female figure at rest by Baltimore artist and Maryland Institute College of Art alumnus Reuben Kramer was acquired to mark their 20th wedding anniversary.

“All our friends said, ‘You should go to Paris,’ and we thought maybe we might do that, but then we found this,” Lee recalls, eyeing the sculpture fondly.

But it’s the couple’s own art that reveals their eclectic spirit. In the master bedroom, alongside the functional mint- and black-colored cello cases, one case stands out. No, it’s no longer in use, but it has graduated to oeuvre d’art. It’s a heavy plywood case with every inch covered with photos of sultry models, clipped from the pages of Vogue magazine. “Isn’t that fun? My husband and I made that in 1984,” Lee says. “I put the sassiest one on the bottom,” says Laughton, pointing to a scantily clad woman in a black bustier, “so if you’re walking behind her as she carries the case, you see it.”

The decoupage creation stood out among the ubiquitous black cases of the day. “People who have been around long enough to remember ask me if I still have it. I’m going to auction it when I retire,” Lee jokes.

Nestled at the end of a long driveway, the first turn onto the property gives a taste of Lee’s design style, which she describes playfully as “easy modern living, with some funkiness.” Among the first things to greet you visually are the energetic lines of a bold, Alexander Calder-inspired metal sculpture installed on the front lawn.

From the outside, the home has the look of a modern cabin, with wood siding and three-sided deck helping it to blend into the trees. Despite the limited square footage, windows on three sides of the great room bring the outside in, with a sliding door leading to a spacious wooden deck that feels like a seamless extension of the living space. It’s the tall windows and vaulted ceilings of this wide-open room—which encompasses the kitchen, living, and dining areas—that sold Lee on the unique residence.

After cosmetic updates completed over the course of a few years (like replacing wall-to-wall carpeting with dark hardwood and painting over a “sunset in the South Sea”-style mural in the master bedroom), the home has come to feel like a sanctuary, Lee says.

In keeping with her modern and funky aesthetic, a sleek, clean design scheme is punctuated by eclectic pieces of art that survived the couple’s serious downsizing.

“This is the first major antique piece that we purchased, about 35 years ago,” Lee recalls, cradling a 17th century Korean vase in her hands. “It has a lot of character,” she says, running her thumb over brush strokes depicting a full moon. The couple picked up the piece on a trip to South Korea, where Lee was born and lived until she was offered a scholarship from the University of Indiana in 1970 to study with legendary cellist Janos Starker. Her family remains in Korea, save her three children and one nephew, who live in Ellicott City.

On the coffee table, a pair of vibrantly painted Iznik ceramics returned with the couple from a trip to Istanbul. A bronze sculpture of a female figure at rest by Baltimore artist and Maryland Institute College of Art alumnus Reuben Kramer was acquired to mark their 20th wedding anniversary.

“All our friends said, ‘You should go to Paris,’ and we thought maybe we might do that, but then we found this,” Lee recalls, eyeing the sculpture fondly.

But it’s the couple’s own art that reveals their eclectic spirit. In the master bedroom, alongside the functional mint- and black-colored cello cases, one case stands out. No, it’s no longer in use, but it has graduated to oeuvre d’art. It’s a heavy plywood case with every inch covered with photos of sultry models, clipped from the pages of Vogue magazine. “Isn’t that fun? My husband and I made that in 1984,” Lee says. “I put the sassiest one on the bottom,” says Laughton, pointing to a scantily clad woman in a black bustier, “so if you’re walking behind her as she carries the case, you see it.”

The decoupage creation stood out among the ubiquitous black cases of the day. “People who have been around long enough to remember ask me if I still have it. I’m going to auction it when I retire,” Lee jokes.

To Lee, the home will always be a work in progress. “Nothing is permanent for me,” she says. “The important thing is you keep editing.”

It’s not so different from her work as a musician. “When practicing, if I don’t like the way this sounds or I don’t like the phrasing, then I would have to come up with a new solution,” she says. “I would call that editing, as well, you see?”

For an accomplished musician who has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world and coached many young cellists into professional careers, Lee’s home rehearsal space is humble. “I practice where that chair is,” she says, pointing to a simple, wooden chair and sheet-metal music stand in the corner of the great room. “I just love playing in this open space, and looking out the windows,” she says, comparing the acoustics here to a concert hall. “My dream is that someday I will invite all the cellists and we will have a cello ensemble here.”

During a few rare, wide-open hours on this unseasonably warm late-autumn day, 45-year-old David Ferraro is standing on his partially finished, historically accurate front porch, contemplating an afternoon bike ride. His plan is to cycle through the wooded trails of Patapsco Valley State Park, into historic Oella, over the Patapsco River across an iron bridge, and back home—16 miles in all.

He’ll begin and end in his own backyard—which he doesn’t own. The yard encompasses roughly two acres of the park, and gives him direct access to its more than 200 miles of trails and the river. He moved into the once-derelict early-19th-century stone home in 2014 as part of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Resident Curatorship Program. It’s a sweet deal: Through the program, Ferraro gets lifetime rent-free living in exchange for restoration and maintenance of the historic home.

For Ferraro, who’s been director of architectural services for the Reginald F. Lewis Museum since 2011 and is an avid cyclist, kayaker, and runner, applying to become resident curator was a no-brainer.

“I had been looking at houses in the curatorship program for 15 years,” says Ferraro, sitting beside a wood-burning stove in the 1,000-square-foot home’s rustic kitchen after his ride. Many were a good fit architecturally, “but kind of far away from what was happening in the rest of my life.”

On the board of two nonprofits with ties to the park, Ferraro had spent countless hours within its boundaries. So when the Department of Natural Resources announced in 2011 it was seeking a resident curator for The Reserve Property, as the tract is known, “I was all over it. I knew right away this place had great bones.”

Ferraro submitted a detailed proposal, restoration plan, financial statements—the works. But winning the bid was just the start. The house, abandoned for years, “was completely vandalized and gutted,” says Ferraro. Mold and animals had moved in. Far from discouraged, “I was just excited,” he says.

For the restoration, he would draw on his 20-some years of background in architecture and building, which had included stints at The National Aquarium, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian’s Office of Architectural History and Historic Preservation, and The Rachel Carson Homestead.

Even before his museum career started, “I had a real aptitude for building and fixing things,” says Ferraro, who grew up in Westminster and spent summers working in construction and cabinetmaking.

As a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he’d studied painting, but found himself creating faux museum installations for fellow students, a development that would eventually land him at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, where he’s in charge of “the entire built environment.” In other words, he’s responsible for everything from constructing the exhibits to the building finishes to supervising the mechanical aspects of the museum.

In his spare time, he rehabbed two historic homes—one in Federal Hill and another in Linthicum. “So I pretty much know what I want to do here,” says Ferraro, who brought to this home technical lessons from his past renovations, but a slightly different aesthetic approach. “In the past, I’ve really focused on expensive kitchens and concrete counters and all these things that are really valued and are good, valid things,” he says. This time? “It’s a cozy place that’s base camp for a rich life. That’s it.”

In the interior, which he is free to renovate without having to meet historic standards, that approach translates to simple touches like the repurposed birch ply, quartersawn white-oak kitchen countertops and, upstairs, an exposed stone entryway in lieu of a master bedroom door. A ladder leads to a third-floor bedroom, and a tiny second-floor room does duty as a mini painting studio.

The home’s simplicity adds up to a bit of unconventional living for Ferraro’s 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, who spend part of each week with him. “I heat it with wood, we don’t have Wi-Fi, we don’t have neighbors,” says Ferraro. “But they love it.”

Nearly three years in, he estimates he’s 50 percent finished with renovations, including the new front porch, which will soon get a roof and, like the rest of the exterior, must be completed to Maryland historic-trust standards. The wood for the porch, for example, “had to be custom tongue and grooved,” says Ferraro. “These aren’t materials you can go to Home Depot and just get.”

Though he’ll pay no rent or mortgage, the home is nowhere near a freebie, explains Peter Morrill, curator program manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. On average, resident curators spend “maybe $150,000 to $250,000 for initial renovations,” he says. “It’s a significant investment of time and money, but the exchange is you get to live in the middle of this gorgeous state park.”

The tradeoff makes perfect sense to Ferraro: Though he’s already done renovations valued by the state at about $100,000, the payback this fall, for example, will be sipping his early morning coffee on the porch while watching a pair of bald eagles fish in the river not far from his front door. “Mostly, I’m just thrilled to be here,” he says. “I try not to think about the money, but more about the lifestyle it brings me and what it brings to my children. And I really do care about the park and the architecture. I take my stewardship pretty seriously.”

“I would hope that people would describe it as modern-traditional ‘shambolic,’ with an emphasis, perhaps, on the last word,” The Walters Art Museum’s executive director Julia Marciari-Alexander says with a laugh. She’s talking about the interior design of the four-bedroom Homeland house she and her husband, John Marciari, bought in 2013, which is, just for the record, anything but a shambles. But it’s clear the goal is simple: Forget the Joneses and just make the place comfortable for the home’s eight denizens, human and otherwise.

Those would include herself, her husband, 11-year-old twins Beatrice and Jack, plus a menagerie of pets: Pancake the bearded dragon and cats Smitten, Lovey, and Dovey. As for the modern-traditional, that comes in the form of what Marciari-Alexander lovingly calls a “mishmash” of furnishings and artwork: some brought from their last home, a custom-build in southern California, others handed down through family or picked up over the years, and some given or made by friends.

Almost all of it came with them when they packed up their West Coast lives and moved to Baltimore so that Marciari-Alexander could take over as the museum’s fifth executive director, the first woman to hold the post.

Though the timing wasn’t exactly planned, the landing in Baltimore was not quite surprising, either.

“When you’re a young, aspiring museum professional, people ask you what your five dream jobs are and one of mine was always the Walters,” says Marciari-Alexander, who most recently was deputy director of curatorial affairs for the San Diego Museum of Art.

But there was also an existing Charm City connection: Prior to her California stint, she spent 12 years in various roles at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, and for three of those years, her husband was commuting to Baltimore to teach at Loyola University. And Marciari-Alexander got to know and love both the museum and the city. “So we were thrilled that we ended up back here,” she says.

Though they considered a few homes in Baltimore County, “we very quickly knew we wanted to be in Roland Park or Homeland,” says Marciari-Alexander. John Marciari knew the areas especially well: At Loyola, he’d taught a class on landscape architecture and gardens and often used Homeland—the creation of the two sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first landscape architect—as an example of neighborhoods that have park-like settings without looking overly designed.

In California, they’d gone for new construction, but their New Haven home had been a 1922 Colonial. “We loved the idea of coming back into a historic development that really reflected the idea around city planning,” says Marciari-Alexander. “That was really important to me, to be part of the city fabric and to support the city as a homeowner.”

The Homeland house turned up early on in the search, but though it seemed ideal, “we thought it was kind of out of our price range,” Marciari-Alexander recalls. The family’s search took them through a host of Roland Park Victorians—“big houses, small rooms,” she says—but they kept circling back. “We really loved this neighborhood and this house.”

A big part of the appeal to the two art-history aficionados was that it was designed in the early part of the last century by the darling design duo of Palmer-Lamdin—architects Edward Livingston Palmer Jr. and William D. Lamdin—and is one of the pair’s “Cotswold Cottages,” with a meandering layout, “destinational” rooms, and intimate interiors.

The elegant first floor seemed ideal for the occasional small dinners Marciari-Alexander hosts for work. And a third-floor space jokingly dubbed the “man garret” (since “man cave” isn’t quite right for the sunlit room, she says) seemed the perfect home office for Marciari, who was about to embark on a year-long book-writing project. (Mission accomplished: The finished work now sits on bookstore shelves and the family’s coffee table and Marciari has since moved on to a job as a curator and head of drawings and prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, commuting home on weekends.)

For Marciari, the quiet third-floor space was certainly alluring, “but the biggest selling point for us with the house was the classic design,” he says. “The combination of exterior stone and slate and the woodwork inside really appealed to us.”

There was another big plus, too: The home was not only move-in ready, but “the previous owners had refurbished the house and the similarity of their taste to ours was really striking,” says Marciari. Arts and Crafts-style touches like the Stickley-inspired built-in table in the breakfast nook, Stickley-inspired radiator covers, and the William Morris wallpaper were reminders of the home Marciari-Alexander’s parents had lived in (and of John’s time as curator of a Stickley exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art). Kitchen tiles inspired by Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh also caught their eye.

That she’d have little to do before moving in was a boon for Marciari-Alexander, who had just taken the helm of the Walters, where she faced the challenge of “following a terrific director.” The most daunting task was thinking about “new ways to view and talk about this collection that is so cherished by so many,” she says.

At home, the challenge was finding space for the couple’s significant collection of books (which leans, no surprise, toward art history) and marrying their home’s style with their eclectic collection of furnishings and art.

In the two-and-a-half years since they moved in, the Walters exec has continued the expansion of the museum’s digital collection and continued to help the public access the museum’s collection in new ways. At home, the family has gotten an even greater appreciation for the intimacy of the space. Says Marciari-Alexander, “We’re very much homebodies, so livability is really it.”

---

Julia Marciari-Alexander in 30 Seconds

Age: 48

Early years: Grew up in Claremont, CA; completed undergrad studies in art history and French at Wellesley; earned a master’s and Ph.D. in history of art at Yale University, plus a master’s in French literature from New York University.

First knew art was in her blood: During a family trip to Rome while she was in 6th grade. “It was 1979, so the then-Pope was brand new. We went to mass in St. Peter’s. We’re not Catholic, but spending that day in St. Peter’s and experiencing how architecture and art and life can create these moments of wonder was a really formative moment in my life.”

Favorite book on her bookshelves: “All books by my husband, most recently his Italian, Spanish, and French Paintings Before 1850 in the San Diego Museum of Art (2015). This represents an important and entire chapter of our life together and all the people from that moment.”

Favorite piece of art at home: “My favorite changes every day. . . . I take great joy especially in the two watercolors by my twins that hang in my bedroom.”

Favorite corner of The Walters: The jewelry collection. “Maybe that’s a little bit obvious for a gender stereotype, but I love the fact that jewelry is one of the art forms that brings together artistic expertise, technology, materials, and what the zeitgeist was doing at the time.”

“I really didn’t want to live here,” American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) founder and director Rebecca Alban Hoffberger says, sitting in the cozy but slightly cluttered den of the late-1970s Owings Mills home she bought in 2008.

Tucked away on a leafy cul-de-sac, it was a perfectly nice, somewhat generic house on the outside, and, even today, there is nothing save a Turkish hand-painted wagon in the yard, some log-cabin-esque woodwork on the porch, and a bright green front door to suggest that the visionary mind behind Baltimore’s funkiest museum lives here.

It wasn’t the house, exactly, that brought her here. Wanting to live near her then-95-year-old father, “it was the only thing that I could afford in this area,” says Hoffberger, who wasn’t particularly impressed with the interior, which sported an abundance of shag carpet, wall mirrors, and pastel wallpaper. Then she stepped into the backyard.

“I know it sounds funny, but I felt the trees sort of hug me,” says the lifelong nature lover, whose museum launch included a tree-of-life exhibit that paid homage to the tree’s role in human history.

Bidding started $30,000 below the listed auction price—a pleasant surprise—but quickly ramped up.

“The bidding went like popcorn,” Hoffberger recalls. “I got to the point where I could not spend one penny more.” And then, in a minor miracle, the bidding stopped with Hoffberger on top. The house was hers.

“With it came the best neighbors—really, I was lucky,” says Hoffberger, who made minor fixes to the house that included pulling up the carpets (to reveal beautiful floors), giving the front porch a rustic makeover, and putting in a circular drive. Above the fireplace in the den, she installed an ornate wood mantel from a New York tenement—a gift from the Lower Eastside Girls Club, which, when founded, took a page from the seven educational goals Hoffberger created when she envisioned AVAM.

For basic furnishings, like the stout and commanding dining-room table, Hoffberger swears by local furnishings purveyor Carpetbeggars, though she’s careful about what she buys, especially when it comes to décor. “I don’t buy very much,” admits Hoffberger. And, no, she’s not trying to build her own AVAM-esque home museum: “I think it would be a conflict of interest to actively collect visionary art for myself,” she explains.

Instead, the home is brimming with items gathered and given that tie into the journey of her 63-year life.

In the den, the nearly 6-foot-tall Aurora painting propped against the fireplace tells one of those stories. Hoffberger had it reproduced inexpensively to replicate a painting that hung in one of her favorite childhood haunts, Haussner’s Restaurant. Nearby, atop the mantel, is a large tortoiseshell button, which elicits another tale. “That button was my first memory of my mother’s coat. I remember being a baby and seeing it,” Hoffberger says.

“Even seemingly standard antique chairs have some humor in them,” says Hoffberger, lifting a seat to reveal their design as “potty chairs.”

Upstairs, a stained-glass window, purchased from a friend who’d stumbled across it in the 1970s during a downtown church remodeling, filters light into the master bedroom. Nearby, just steps from her bed, is a small round table loaded with photos and knickknacks—a shrine to beloved friends and family who have passed away.

And then there are the gifts, reminders of the people who’ve touched her life, like Marcel Marceau, the famous mime who recruited Hoffberger at age 16 as his first-ever American apprentice. The street scene sketch by Marceau that hangs in the dining room was given to Hoffberger by a friend who found it at an auction.

“It was one of the most thoughtful gifts I ever got,” says Hoffberger, who stayed in France after her apprenticeship, married a ballet dancer at 17, co-founded a ballet company at 19, and then returned to Baltimore to deliver her first child, Belina. (Hoffberger also spent time in Mexico, where she studied alternative and folk medicine, re-married, and had a second child, Athena.)

And, of course, there are reminders of those she has met by way of AVAM, including a dining-room centerpiece that was a gift from Vollis Simpson, creator of the Giant Whirligig that stands outside AVAM. “That will eventually go to the museum,” says Hoffberger. “But I love it so much.” Also close to her heart are three small statues: “They’re from [Irish-American sculpture artist] Patrick McGuire, one of my unsung heroes,” she says.

It all adds up to a home that’s perfectly in line with what matters most to its owner, says daughter Athena. “You can tell that she’s paying tribute to all the things that she appreciates in life, whether it be my grandparents or the simple craftsmanship of some obscure tribe,” she says. “The way she does it just has a flair of magic to it.”

Of course, even when she’s at home, her raison d’être, AVAM, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary in the fall with a star-studded gala, is never far from Hoffberger’s mind. Eventually, she’ll step away from the day-to-day rigors of running it, but before she does, there’s still unfinished business. “We still have the big nut to crack of the endowment,” she says. Hoffberger hopes to find a benefactor with $25 million to spend on naming rights to the museum. “We hope the name is Aaron von Aardvarc so we keep the AVA,” she quips. “But we’re open to any good soul.”

She is, by nature, hopeful, but right now, “above all, I’m feeling thankful,” she says. Not only is the museum on solid financial footing, but it’s also supported by a stellar staff, which eases the worry about any eventual transition.

When the time does come, the first order of business might be some quiet time off—Hoffberger notes she hadn’t gone on a vacation in 14 years until she took a work/play trip last year to London to judge the Alternative Miss World contest. She’ll also likely tackle another lifelong dream—writing a play, and adds studying physics to the list.

“I do love science so much and, since 1984, when I had the idea for the museum, I wanted to write a play about the friendship between Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain,” she says.

She’ll also, no doubt, downsize and streamline her life and her home, a notion that has become more appealing the older and the more in touch with nature she gets. “I see myself in some little shack in the woods on a mountain,” she says, adding that she’ll take with her little more than her mother’s jacket button and her photos. The rest she’ll pass along to friends and family, “just as they were given to me,” she says. “They’ll go to people to whom I feel they really belong—there’s something about them that matches the object. And, hopefully, it will bring them joy as well.”

---

Rebecca Hoffberger in 30 Seconds

Age: 63

Grew Up: Stevenson

You might not know: Hoffberger was accepted into college at age 15, but instead headed to France to become the first American mime apprentice for Marcel Marceau.

Career moves: Co-founder of New City Ballet company; nonprofit consultant; folk and alternative medicine trainee in Mexico; development director at the Mt. Sinai Hospital Department of Psychiatry for People Encouraging People; founder, director, and principal curator of AVAM.

Some kudos: 2011 Katherine Coffey Award from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums; honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Stevenson University, Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, and McDaniel College; inductee into The Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame; winner of the Urban Land Institute’s National Award for Excellence.

Things she can’t live without: “People who make me laugh. Trees.
The sweet memories of my parents. Watermelon. Ancient Aliens TV show. The poetry of Rumi. Artist Andrew

Logan’s mirrored jewelry. An unending search for meaning and justice. Hope. Marrons glacés. Vanilla ice cream in coffee. Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap. Tea Rose perfume. My museum staff and two awesome daughters.”

When Enoch Pratt Free Library CEO Carla Hayden first walked into the three-bedroom condominium on the 14th floor of Cross Keys’ Harper House in Roland Park, she was struck by the stunning views of leafy north Baltimore. But something else stood out, too.

“Everything was wallpapered. Evvvvery-thing,” Hayden says, drawing out the word for emphasis. Not only was it wallpapered, but the Asian-themed design was all over: Think pagodas and peacocks with purple accents. On the walls were mirrors, the better to capture that wallpapered glory from every angle. And on the floors? “Let’s just say the wallpaper matched the pink carpet,” she says.

Hayden had already considered flashier, updated condos for sale in the building, one with a sleek new kitchen, another with an entire bedroom converted to a closet that Hayden admits she found “gorgeous.”

But a gourmet kitchen was overkill for Hayden, who isn’t a big cook, and, as for the closet, well, “that’s not practical,” she says. “I don’t have that many clothes.” What the 62-year-old library executive does have is—no surprise—books, and lots of them.

“Finding a space for the books became very important,” she says. So, too, was finding a home that could offer quiet respite after busy days at work.

Looking past the outdated décor, Hayden, a fan of renovation TV shows like Property Brothers, focused on the free-flowing layout, spacious second floor, and, yes, those views.

“The thing about watching a lot of those shows, or just being involved even professionally with renovations, is you do look at the potential,” she says. “It had good bones.”

The building itself also offered a certain appeal: Hayden’s mother, Colleen, who is in her 80s, has been living there since 2004, in a condo Hayden initially bought for herself when she moved from Chicago to Baltimore in 1993 to take Enoch Pratt’s top job.

Hayden had long since moved out to a Homeland townhouse, but she almost always stopped by her mother’s place after work. With the demands of a library system that serves 1.3 million visitors a year, days were long and tiring and, as she visited with her mom, Hayden found herself winding down “only to have to get back in the car and go home.” In bad weather, she would sometimes stay the night.

She reasoned that a condo in the same building would simplify things: There’d be just one drive, then a quick trip in the elevator after dinner with her mother. From her balcony, she could sip her morning coffee and see her mother circling the gated community on her morning walk. “So that’s kinda cool, just being that close to her,” says Hayden.

Still, when she closed on the purchase in December 2014, Hayden knew she had a good bit of cosmetic work to complete before moving in. For help, she turned to contractor Brian Schmincke of Accent Specialist Marine, who’d done work for her and for the library in the past.

The problem wasn’t the pink carpeting, which came up easily and revealed pristine parquet floors. Instead, it was the wallpaper, which “was 20 or 30 years old and it was really hard to get off,” says Hayden, who pulls out her phone to display “before” pictures of Schmincke in a silly pose with the wallpaper behind him. “It helped to laugh about it a little.”

Schmincke may have had a sense of humor about the job, but “it was definitely a nightmare,” he says. “I’ve never seen people put wallpaper on the ceiling before. There was wallpaper on the closet doors. There was wallpaper inside the closets. Layers and layers of it.” Still, Hayden’s calm demeanor and good humor helped the job flow smoothly, says Schmincke, who found himself staying late to help move boxes or tackle other tasks. “She’s just that type of person that you don’t mind doing that for her.”

Though she had a new home, Hayden didn’t feel the need for a shopping spree to fill it. “It’s not for entertaining. It’s just a place to come into and go ‘phew,’” she says, exhaling dramatically and letting her arms float down onto the couch. “It’s a refuge and a place to just enjoy the things I’ve collected.”

With the wallpaper gone, Hayden happily got to work setting up. “It’s fun,” she says, “decorating again with your own things and rediscovering them.”

Those things included hand-me-downs from her grandmother, with whom Hayden shared a similar love of knickknacks, and African art that she picked up here and on a 2003 trip to Africa as president of the American Library Association. Her collectibles from the continent favor the practical, like bowls and baskets, “things that are used every day in those cultures,” says Hayden.

There are a host of awards, too, tucked away on an upstairs bookcase, including a Woman of the Year honor from Ms. magazine and one of her favorites, a brightly colored, personalized name tag from the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland.

And, of course, there are the books—there were about 90 boxes that moved with her. They are loosely organized by theme—Hayden seems content to buck the librarian’s tendency to “obsess about book placements.” The topics range from entertainment to cooking to self-improvement, and even books about books.

By May of this year, Hayden was still in the process of settling in to her new home and was also in the midst of a busy stretch at work, with an ambitious three-and-a-half-year renovation of Enoch Pratt’s central branch set to start in December, and smaller renovations at the Canton and Waverly branches wrapping up. That’s in addition to ongoing efforts to modernize the library system technology. It’s now the largest provider of public-access computers in the state and boasts an impressive ebook collection, as well as ereaders it loans to library patrons.

Those efforts haven’t left her much time to putter around her new home and discover its secrets (like figuring out the optimal setting for the electronic bedroom drapes that shelter a master-bedroom atrium). “Everyone keeps telling me to take a staycation and take a week to just live in it,” says Hayden, who envisions lingering over coffee on the balcony, cuddling up in front of the TV to catch one of her favorite British programs, or catching up on the latest from two of her favorite mystery writers, Laura Lippman and Sujata Massey.

“I have to do it,” she says, adding resolutely, “I will do it. I’m looking forward to it.”

Ted Frankel is the first to admit that his Mt. Vernon row home isn’t, you know, normal. “It’s who I am, so it’s not everybody’s house,” he says. “It’s an artist’s house and a comfortable house.”

As he says this, he is nestled in the corner of a fire-engine-red sofa, with a comically caricaturish bust of Lincoln and an array of bric-a-brac perched on three small tables behind him. To his right, the fireplace surround sports a colorful paint-by-numbers collage and on the walls all around is art as far as the eye can see.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever set foot in Sideshow, the American Visionary Art Museum’s (AVAM) raucous gift shop, which Frankel opened in 2004 to offer up original art, funky jewelry, novelty toys, and oddball gifts that range from the quirky to the absurd.

That he lives in Baltimore at all was a bit of an unlikely development for Frankel, a Cleveland native who for nearly four decades owned and operated three similar shops in Chicago. He’d gotten his start on a bit of a whim—the then-art director and lifelong “junker and collector” snapped up an about-to-close novelty store in its entirety when the owner refused to sell him only the items he really wanted.

Frankel soon expanded that operation, which began in just 300 square feet of retail space, and was firmly established in the Windy City when a trip to Baltimore with a friend changed everything. Visiting AVAM with visual artist Nancy Josephson (creator of the glittery mosaic bus that sits outside the museum), Frankel suddenly found himself face to face with museum founder Rebecca Hoffberger.

“She was giving a tour and stopped the tour and gave me a hug and said, ‘It was nice to meet you,'” says Frankel. “We talked for maybe two minutes.”

It was the briefest of meetings, and yet, two months later, when Hoffberger was looking to rejigger and expand the museum’s gift shop, she called Frankel. “She said ‘You’re the one,’ and I said, ‘The one what?'” Frankel recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘I have three stores in Chicago and I’m not moving to Baltimore.'” But Hoffberger persevered and after another, longer meeting, “it sounded and felt right,” says Frankel. “I’m a very spiritual business person.”

Decision made, Frankel quickly snapped up the Mt. Vernon house, which came with the condition that it be reconverted from apartments to a single-family home.

The move was a daunting one: Frankel was adept at opening and running stores, but he had just one friend in Baltimore. “It was scary, but I wasn’t afraid,” he says. “I think fate brought me to Baltimore.”

At the museum, Frankel chose the name Sideshow for his shop, “because it’s not the main attraction, it’s sort of where the freak lives.” More than a mere retailer of quirky goods, Frankel wanted Sideshow, like his other stores, to be a reprieve from the rules of the real world, “sort of the safe space on the Monopoly board,” he says. “When I create a space, I’m really comfortable and I hope the people who come in are really comfortable.”

Bringing that vision to reality proved easier than you might think. Frankel’s signature retail setup—think old wooden fixtures and lots of little drawers “because people like to explore things”—proved ideal for the location. Filling those shelves wasn’t hard either, mostly because Frankel is always on the lookout for items that amuse or inspire, whether it’s self-adhesive mustaches, handmade jewelry, outsider art, or even squirrel underpants (seriously). The result is part treasure trove, part fever dream.

“People who really get it, go, ‘What an incredible collection of stuff—or crap,'” says Frankel, who knows that, for some people, the store, like his home, may be visual overload but adds, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Similarly, at home, Frankel would find filling the space no problem. For a person who believes “anything touched by human hands is special,” art is all around. “All I wanted was a house with good bones and I could do the rest,” he says. But the remodeling process dragged on, leaving Frankel to crash with his sole Baltimore friend for months. “Eventually, I ran out of money and trust in the contractor,” says Frankel. This forced him to abandon his plan to paint the home’s walls a bright hue and, instead, leave them neutral. “It works,” he says, shrugging. “There’s so much great art in the house, that people don’t really notice.”

That brings us, of course, to the art, which covers nearly every inch of those neutral walls, hangs from the stairwell and the ceilings, and sits atop tables and shelves. It includes mini-portraits made from sock threads of prison inmate Ray Materson, offbeat family-life paintings by Martin Mull, and jarring Matt Sesow paintings that hang on an upper floor landing. Then there’s the chandelier crafted almost entirely of spoons (and the one cobbled together from clear plastic hangers), the velvet Elvises, and the coin mosaic walls in the guest bathroom. There are even paintings and sculptures created by Frankel, though he rarely points them out to visitors. “It’s fun to see if they react to them,” Frankel says.

Whatever the piece and whomever the artist, ultimately the decision to display it in the home comes down to gut instinct. “You buy what you like,” as Frankel says. “If you’re going to live with it, you want to be surrounded by things that either inspire you or amuse you or make you happy.”

Frankel had barely gotten Sideshow up and running when his connection with Hoffberger yielded an unexpected benefit: “Rebecca set me up on a blind date with my now-husband,” he says. That would be Bill Gilmore, head of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, and a former art director like Frankel.

As he got to know Frankel, Gilmore also got to know the house—and its collection. “You can’t take it all in at once because it’s sort of like getting to know the person,” says Gilmore, whose own home-design style leans more contemporary.

“Still, I related to it. I could certainly appreciate it and understand it,” says Gilmore, though, like Frankel, he admits, “it’s not going to be for everyone.”

The two were soon splitting their time between their two homes and, before long, adding to the collection became a team effort, with pieces gathered from galleries, thrift shops, flea markets, and art school sales—locally and from the couple’s travels to far corners of the world.

On their travels, Frankel and Gilmore connect with artists of all stripes, sometimes through introductions by Hoffberger, though even their chance encounters are almost by design. “I sort of believe you should live with an open heart and open eyes—never walk down the street on the same side,” says Frankel, who recalls stumbling across a visionary artist in Cartagena, Colombia, just because, “I happened to go down the right street.” Spotting the painting of a grinning donkey and slightly suspicious-looking cow that now hangs in his living room, “I took it off the frame and rolled it and carried it home,” he says. “I pretty much always come home loaded up.”

Frankel and Gilmore have a history of charitable works here and abroad. Among other efforts, they raised $40,000 for art and medical supplies following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. But in 2013, they went a step further, creating an arts-focused charitable foundation under the umbrella of the Baltimore Community Foundation.

In 2013, nearly 10 years after they first met, Frankel and Gilmore officially tied the knot in a small private ceremony officiated by Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. A later reception at The Cloisters, where Hoffberger had first approached Gilmore with the idea of a blind date, was bigger, and in line with parties at home that Frankel and Gilmore have become known for.

“The way we throw a party is always really great food and casual, which always makes it comfortable,” says Frankel, whose annual holiday party at home draws 200-plus guests, ranging from the museum’s cleaning crew to the governor.

Like Sideshow, the home is “a touch-it house,” says Frankel, which means guests are free to explore the entire home and its works. “We have little kids that come in and they want to play with the vintage toys and that’s okay,” he says.

And while his collection often grabs visitors’ attention, it also offers a way for Frankel, who calls himself “kind of shy,” to comfortably connect with anyone who enters his home. As at work, where Frankel can often be found cheerfully filling in customers on where and how a piece was made, at home he delights in sharing the story behind the art.

“Everything has a story,” he says. “So, no matter what they point at, I can start talking about it. Hopefully, when people leave my house, they know a little bit about me.”

And it’s Frankel’s hope, too, that they’ll get something more—the chance to share the feelings the pieces invoke, the chance “to be touched by the human element.” After all, even if it’s not everybody’s art, Frankel says, “someone’s hands and mind have made it.”

They have tackled state political campaigns, and have even switched sides from Democrat to Republican in a traditionally blue state. They founded a booming insurance company, worked with charities, raised children, and welcomed grandchildren.

At this point, you’d think former Maryland State Senator Francis “Frank” Kelly, 74, and his wife, Janet, who describes herself as being in her “early 70s,” would be ready to kick back and maybe downsize to some condo on a fake lake in a gated Palm Beach golf community. But after living in their Hunt Valley home for 26 years, the couple decided to tackle another major project: renovating their kitchen. It was a job, however, that quickly snowballed into something much bigger.

“Originally, my vision was to get new cabinets,” Janet says with a laugh. “But then a friend of ours came by and she said, ‘Janet, why don’t you take this wall out?'” That friend, notably, was interior designer Juliette Palarea, who had other ideas, too. “And, why don’t you open that wall? And why don’t you fix the step-down?,” Palarea asked.

“My response,” says Janet, “was ‘Oh, well, that’s much more than I planned.’ But before I knew it, we had captured that vision as well.”

The Kellys’ seven-month-long renovation began with a crack team: high-end builder Delbert Adams Construction Group and Palarea of JP Styles.

Palarea created a new first-floor layout with an open-living concept, which led to redesigning the kitchen space, tearing down walls, refinishing the hardwoods, and—because the Kellys’ foyer, den, kitchen, family room, and extended family room were all at different floor elevations—changing those elevations.

“One of the best changes in the house was the floor levels. There were a lot,” says Palarea.

“Their smaller family room was sunken. And they wanted to bring that elevation up as the main part of the house, along with the kitchen and the front foyer,” explains August Reichert, project manager for Delbert Adams Construction Group. “That offered us one challenge. We had to get our floor elevations on the same plane.”

At first, Frank Kelly was hesitant about the changes.

“I didn’t like the idea of leveling the floors,” he recalls. “I liked the den before, but I have to tell you, I love it now. It’s beautiful. Janet did a great job with it. I have learned to trust her and, when she makes a decision, to do it.”

Janet and Frank wanted two working stations in their kitchen, one for meal preparation and entertaining, the other serving as a desk for Frank. It has a drawer designed solely for electrical outlets, to tuck away phone chargers and cords. The work station is described by the Kellys as Frank’s “command center,” where he can do his paperwork with a view of the TV.

“I have gotten comfortable at my work station,” says Frank, grinning. This means paperwork has started to encroach on the new kitchen: “That’s my protest,” kids Janet. “Why are you leaving your papers out?”

While the two may disagree about the organization of the “command center,” they do agree that the kitchen redesign turned out beautifully.

Palarea designed the new kitchen and helped pick out the cabinetry with her go-to guy, Christopher Dorsey of Kenwood Kitchens.

Their plan was to replace the previous dark-wood cabinetry with creamy white—giving it a fresh, clean look. The countertops on the two islands are soft cream-colored granite with flows of brown. The kitchen perimeter countertops are rich chocolate honed marble, contrasting nicely with the soft white marble backsplash. The kitchen’s jewelry, cabinet knobs, and drawer pulls are antique brass with tortoise-stone accents.

Another subtler accent is the window above their kitchen sink area, which was replaced with a larger one to bring more sunlight into the space.

“Janet is a serious cook,” says Reichert. “She uses the kitchen. The function was definitely important to her. The style, the sink size, the stove, her refrigerator and oven—those were all really key things. It’s a kitchen that will be used, and it needed to be designed for someone who would use it for entertaining.”

The Kellys maintain a full social calendar, hosting political events, charity functions, luncheons, and family holidays at their home.

“I love to entertain,” says Janet. “And one thing I can do now is entertain for 65 people here,” she adds, referring to the new open-concept plan where the kitchen eating area opens up to their extended family room. “Even though the house isn’t enormous, we are still able to do that.”

Predictably, the new kitchen also has turned into the main gathering spot. “It is interesting during parties. Everyone always wants to be in the kitchen,” Frank says.

One reason for that is the sense of space that the open floor plan achieved—which is what required walls to come down.

Palarea and Reichert knew that in order to achieve the overall vision for this space, a steel beam needed to replace a load-bearing wall that separated the kitchen from the lower-level, extended family room.

“The idea is what they wanted to capture—take a smaller, older family room and create a breakfast room-dining area that was an extension of the kitchen,” says Reichert.

The beam became, Reichert says, “one of the outstanding features that made a tremendous difference in how the house space worked and how the space flowed.”

Reichert’s team, with the help of Palarea, installed two decorative support columns to replace the wall. The space became expansive—the extended family room has a wall of beautiful windows that draws in the sun. The windows give guests a view of the Kellys’ manicured backyard, including a glimpse of the small, charming putting green. The view, along with the rooms, blends well.

“I love the feeling. I love how it feels,” says Janet. ” It’s not ostentatious. It feels friendly and inviting.”

During the renovations, the Kellys had to rough it a bit: They turned their laundry room into a makeshift kitchen, which wasn’t ideal—but they knew it was temporary. And rather than the artfully displayed pictures they previously had on the walls, zippered vinyl tarps cordoned off construction zones. But even though there was a little disarray, the Kellys say they actually enjoyed the process.

“It was fun to come home at night to see the progress that was being made,” shares Frank.

Not only was the project rewarding for the Kellys, but also for the people they hired.

“The most memorable part of the project was them saying ‘yes’ to it. I was shocked,” admits Palarea. “I really had no indication that they would go from just a kitchen remodel to an entire first-floor gutting. Every room on the first floor, except their bedroom, was affected and changed by the renovation. That was a very exciting day.”

“The Kellys were terrific to work with,” says Reichert. “They were available when decisions had to be made, or finalized and changed. They were active participants in the project.”

But as with any home renovation, there was the unexpected.

“Everything was done,” recalls Janet. “We were all excited. We were up and running, and we went away for a period of time. But when someone came in to check our house, they found that our new ice machine had conked out and there was water all over the floors in the kitchen, and they were all buckled. We had to do all the floors all over again.”

“It was a $10,000 mishap,” says Frank, “but we had insurance that covered some of it.”

Despite that hiccup, they are so happy with the results of the project that they even did something similar to their kitchen at their 20-year-old Bethany Beach home.

And the similarities between a home renovation and a political campaign? “You better plan well,” says Janet, “and you have to be adaptable.”

“You have to prepare for the unexpected, especially in a political campaign,” adds Frank. “But as well as you plan it, you’re still dealing with people.”

Debbie Phelps almost always buys things in threes. That’s fitting: Her three children, including her youngest—swimming phenom Michael Phelps—are grown and living on their own, but never far from Phelps’s heart or mind.

“I carried those back from Fukuoka,” says 63-year-old Phelps, motioning to three parasols mounted against a charcoal wallpapered wall in the foyer of her harbor-front Ritz-Carlton Residences condominium in Federal Hill. The trip—to the 2001 swimming world championships in Fukuoka, Japan—had been one of her first international forays, and she’d brought home not only the parasols, but also a triumphant 16-year-old Michael, who’d broken his own world record for a gold medal win in the 200-meter butterfly.

It’s fitting, too, that those parasols are the first things greeting visitors when the private elevator doors open to Phelps’s second-floor residence. The foyer—warm, lush, and punctuated with this subtle memento—sets the tone for the whole home.

“When I walk in, I want my home to almost open its arms and wrap me up in them,” says Phelps, who moved in 2013 to her current unit from a larger space in the same development, keeping much of the same design. “I want it to be comfortable. I want it to be home.”

But in creating the space, Phelps had another goal in mind, this one tied to her family’s remarkable journey. “I want my home to tell the story,” says Phelps, sitting just steps from the foyer in a home office lined with images of the cities that played a starring role in her son’s rise to fame, including Sydney, Athens, Barcelona, and London. Around her, and scattered throughout the home, are keepsakes collected as she traveled to competitions across the globe. “It’s like opening a window to where things have been,” she says.

Though the journey began in Western Maryland, where she grew up—and where she met ex-husband Fred Phelps—the past 15 years, in particular, have been a truly instructional affair. The run-up to those years had moved the family from Harford County, where Debbie Phelps was a public-school teacher in home economics, to Baltimore County, so that eldest daughter Hilary could pursue a swimming career with the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Phelps’s middle child, Whitney, and youngest, Michael, soon followed in their sister’s footsteps, plunging Debbie Phelps into the hectic life of a swim mom. Both daughters proved to be accomplished swimmers, but it was Michael who captured the world’s attention with his athletic feats, competing in the 2000 Sydney Olympics at age 15, nabbing six gold medals at the Athens Olympics in 2004, a record eight gold medals in Beijing in 2008, and then another another four in London in 2012—all contributing to his unprecedented total of 22 Olympic medals.

Debbie Phelps, of course, was there for it all, an exhilarating ride she details in her speaking engagements and in her book, A Mother for All Seasons. At televised competitions, when the camera panned from Michael in the pool to his mom in the crowd, she was often caught in what she calls a “DP moment,” alternately cheering and wiping away tears. Her career, meanwhile, progressed on its own upward trajectory, taking her from the classroom into administrative roles and finally to her current position as director of The Education Foundation of Baltimore County Public Schools.

Though her Baltimore County homes—first in West Towson and then in Rodgers Forge—offered family-friendly living within striking distance of the swim center, Phelps says she’d always told her children she was eventually city-bound, in search of convenience and “the energy of the city.” If she could be on the water—non-chlorinated for a change—all the better. In the meantime, she had to make do with the fountain in the backyard of her Rodgers Forge townhome that was “as close as I could get to the harbor,” she jokes.

By 2010, with her children launched in their own lives, Phelps was ready to make a move. There was no need to search: She’d known since shortly after the 2008 Beijing Olympics exactly where she’d land. Heading home from Michael’s official homecoming celebration at Fort McHenry, she noticed the brand new Ritz-Carlton Residences outside the window. “I remember saying to everyone in the SUV, ‘I want to live there someday,’” says Phelps.

Moving in—first to a garden-style two-bedroom condo and later into the one-bedroom unit she now calls home—Phelps finally has the vibrant city life she wanted, plus maintenance-free living with breathtaking water and city views. Her new home also offers a welcome sense of security and privacy. The post-Olympics public outpouring of admiration for Michael was “humbling and warm and exciting,” says Phelps, but there was no denying her family was now firmly in the public domain (a point driven home to Phelps one night as she sat in her Rodgers Forge family room and looked out the open door to see a stranger peering in). “It’s like I said to Michael recently—he belongs to the public,” Phelps says. Still, “sometimes people just need their space. I can have that here.”

It’s here that Phelps can relax on her “DP days,” a once-a-month ritual she’s adopted in recent years. “There’s no watch, my phone is on mute or vibrate, and the kids know that if they call and I don’t answer, mostly it’s a Saturday and it’s a DP day.”

Often she heads to Harford County on those days, but “there are days I can come here, and I don’t have to leave at all,” she says. “It’s always nice some days just to relax and leave your pajamas on and do nothing except watch Law & Order or football all weekend.”

It’s here, too, that the family can gather to connect and reflect on their collective experience, something they couldn’t do while Michael was in the midst of his meteoric rise. Though the family and Michael’s coach, Bob Bowman, had shared some of the same magical memories, “when we were living this, I didn’t really know how Bob felt when Michael won the eighth gold, or how Michael felt after he didn’t medal in the 400 IM in London,” she explains. And with Michael always off to the next challenge, there was never the time nor the space to reflect. “This home gives us that. It’s a place to talk through all the experiences, because, no, we have not gone through photo albums and said, ‘Remember this? Remember this?’”

When she moved from Rodgers Forge, Phelps left behind all of her furniture, in part for her niece, who’d moved into her old home, “but also,” Phelps pauses, “because it was a new chapter.” To design the space that would reflect her style, she turned to Colorado-based interior designer Lita Dirks.

“Lita said, ‘Tell me what you like.’” Phelps says. Although on this day in August, Phelps is comfortably dressed in a summery all-white ensemble, with chunky silver jewelry and peep-toed slingbacks, “for much of the year, I wear a lot of warm colors: reds and blues and greens,” she says. With that in mind, she and Dirks put together a palette for the home that mirrors Phelps’s wardrobe.

Her penchant for deep reds, plus a post-Beijing Olympics mindset lent itself to Asian-inspired touches like a crisp, lacquered dining-room china cabinet that’s flanked by a terra-cotta soldier on one side and a copper kimono statuette on the other. But there are whimsical notes, as well, like the portrait of pearl-bedecked ostrich in one of the guest bathrooms or the zebra-striped chest in the hallway.

And of course, family is woven throughout, from the 12-seat dining-room table that fits the extended clan to the three slim statues standing sentry beside the living-room fireplace. (“This is Hilary, Whitney, and Michael,” says Phelps, noting that Hilary’s statue has its eyes closed, “just like her baby picture.”)

Family also includes grandchildren Taylor, 8, and Connor, 6. And Grandma Phelps—that’s “G” to the grandkids—wanted this to feel like home to them, too. As she notes this, she points out the childproof table, perfect for coloring or playing games, but more telling is her recounting of then-4-year-old Connor’s first encounter with the three statues. As Connor began, in typical preschooler fashion, to “look with his hands,” Phelps’s first worry wasn’t about losing an expensive piece of home décor but instead that, “he’ll be so upset if it breaks.”

Even the kitchen is, in its own way, part of the story. Sleek and functional, it’s the kitchen of someone more excited about the new restaurant at the Ritz than the latest culinary gadget. Though her children are endlessly amused by the notion of a home-economics teacher who doesn’t like to cook, Phelps is happy to cede the kitchen to her daughters, who visit often. “That is not my forte,” says Phelps with a laugh.

In moving into her current unit, Phelps transferred much of Dirks’s design, tweaked with the help of Rita St. Clair Associates to add color, especially on the walls, and to conform to a new layout. Eight months in, Phelps was still revising when an Asian-inspired trunk in the window of Harbor East’s Arhaus caught her eye. “That’s when I met Debbie,” Phelps says of Arhaus interior specialist Debbie Shepard. “I said, ‘I want that piece!’”

As the two walked the showroom floor and chatted, “we just clicked,” says Phelps. The trunk is now featured beneath the parasols in Phelps’s foyer, its taupe-painted finish complementing the neutral shades in the parasols. And Shepard is a newfound friend and design consultant.

Both Phelps and Shepard declare the home a work in progress. In the near future, they’ll add a sitting area to the bedroom to capitalize on the stunning water view and a large, round table beside the kitchen to accommodate the growing family. But the biggest need is for display space, says Shepard. Tucked away in storage, Phelps has “some great treasures to work with from her travels,” and her life, says Shepard. “They have sentimental value. We really need to have some of these out so she can enjoy them.”

Phelps has designs for her life outside the home, as well, of course. In 2016, she’ll reach the 40-year milestone as a public educator. She is “not by any means ready to stop working,” she says, though her next move is still up in the air. “I’ve often thought about going back and getting my doctorate,” she says, noting it would be more for self-satisfaction than anything else. “And, I don’t know, maybe another book.”

However her future pursuits unfold, they will be closely tied to family, including Michael, though the public focus on the champion now is not what anyone expected, after his DUI arrest in September, which prompted the swimmer to seek treatment and delay his return to competitive swimming.

“As a parent, it is very disappointing,” Debbie Phelps said in an e-mail response to us following her son’s arrest, which occurred after this interview. “But I am proud of him for taking responsibility and support his decision to focus on himself right now.”

And while nobody knows where Michael’s career will go next, Debbie Phelps’s role remains unchanged. “We’re just going to support him like we always have,” she says.

No matter what, the Phelps family will always have each other—and a place to gather. “You raise your children with wings to fly. I feel like I’ve given them wings to be successful,” Phelps says, edging close to a DP moment before breaking into a smile. “But it doesn’t mean you can’t all hang out together.”

When David and Brandy Dopkin moved into their four-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath home on a cul-de-sac in Mt. Washington, they had very clear ideas about what they wanted in an abode. For Brandy, it was all about having a close-knit community and a place for their growing children, Jordana, 6, and Graham, 4, to play.

“I wanted the kind of neighborhood where I could knock on someone’s door, borrow eggs, sit on the porch, and watch kids play in the court,” says Brandy. For David, son of legendary late restaurateur/caterer Eddie Dopkin (Classic Catering and Miss Shirley’s Café), it was all about having a showcase setting, as well as an easy commute to his three Miss Shirley’s Café locations. “I’m very detail-oriented and a perfectionist,” he says, laughing. “I like everything to be matchy-matchy.”

Of course, when you understand all the odd similarities the two have, it’s no surprise that the couple, married eight years, managed to have both of their criteria met in one home. Consider this: Both attended University of Maryland, College Park, at the same time; both taught fifth grade for five years in Baltimore County; and both of them—only children—were born on the same day in Baltimore 38 years ago within an hour of each other. But it wasn’t until David’s former girlfriend fixed them up that they came into each other’s orbit.

“Brandy and I have so many things in common, it’s crazy,” says David, managing member of Miss Shirley’s, “down to the fact that both our dads are Ed, and they both drove the same car in the same color.” Adds Brandy, “We even grew up with the same breed of dog [a schipperke].”

There are, of course, some distinct differences. Brandy (who is head of human resources for Miss Shirley’s) is extroverted, for instance, where David is on the quieter, more contemplative side. Though Brandy recalls growing up “in a very quiet home,” she figured it was her job as a kid to shake things up. “So I’m the one who loves a lot of noise and has the whole neighborhood in the house. David used to get mad at me because when he’d come home from a busy workday, there would be a thousand people in the house.”

But despite the influx of people and annual traditions such as Halloween parties, everything is in its proper place, and the overall effect in their home is one of calm and comfort, with oversized sofas, ottomans, and plenty of places to de-stress from the day.

“Our world is extremely hectic from the minute we leave this house,” says Brandy. “The restaurant business, and customer service, and pleasing people is extremely demanding, so we needed our home to be a quiet place where we could regroup and re-center. And we can’t get enough of the color brown.”

Comfortable and cozy were the operative words used when discussing décor with local designer Joseph Lazzaro. “I’m all about Under Armour,” says David. “If we don’t have to get dressed up, we don’t. We’re not grand-chandelier type of people. We got married at the American Visionary Art Museum. We like funky, modern, eclectic.”

As in many households, the Dopkin kitchen—with its open, airy feel; dramatic curved, granite island; and state-of-the-art appliances—is the heart of the home, though the duo is fond of eating out. (Sofi’s Crepes, Ambassador Dining Room, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and Volt are on speed dial, while takeout dishes from Miss Shirley’s and Classic Catering are staples when guests are over.) “Believe it or not, Brandy and I are not culinary people,” says David. “We eat out a lot.” Concurs Brandy, “I hate to cook. I’ve always said, ‘I don’t get why you would cook when you can call the caterer.’ Ironically, when I started dating David, I didn’t even know he was affiliated with Classic Catering.”

Though the couple worked with professionals to get a finished look, it was important for them to have their own imprint as well. “I always wanted a home that told a little bit of a story,” says Brandy. “I don’t like just going to Pier 1 and buying a plate—although you need those pieces, too. A lot of things in this house tell a story, and that’s what’s important to me.”

The couple’s history is told in nearly every room of the house, from the framed menu from the Ambassador, where they had their first date, to a Romero Britto serigraph bought on vacation in Miami, to a kinetic wood sculpture purchased in New York on the occasion of their fifth anniversary.

“I grew up in a really lovely home,” says Brandy, “but things were placed because a decorator put them there, and it never told a story. In every room, we have little things that have meaning.”

The home also reflects the Baltimore-born-and-bred couple’s love of all things Charm City—from a delicate trio of Artscape elephants to a life-sized crab sculpture in the backyard to signed jerseys from hometown-team greats, including Ray Lewis, Cal Ripken Jr., Jim Palmer, and Johnny Unitas. Then there are the personal photos that speak to the family’s long-standing relationship with the Ravens.

“Those are photographs of [late Ravens owner] Art Modell at different stages in his life,” says David, pointing to a silver frame holding several vintage photographs. “There will never be anyone like him again.” David’s close relationship with football in Baltimore also included his stint as Classic Catering’s director of food services for the Ravens and, these days, he still oversees Classic’s Ravens accounts.

For David, meaning also comes from prominently displayed pieces that once belonged to his beloved father, who died last October. A Wurlitzer jukebox, a Classic Coke vending machine, and artwork that includes a playful 3-D Charles Fazzino Hanna-Barbera print and finely detailed Hiro Yamagata “Four Seasons” prints showcase his dad’s sense of fun and whimsy. Unique family memorabilia furthers the family narrative.

“I threw a birthday party for my dad and had these Eddie bobbleheads made for every guest,” says David, pointing to a small figure that resembles his father. “My dad loved Atlantic City, so he’s holding blackjack chips, a Miss Shirley’s oven mitt, and a spoon from Classic Catering.”

Of the many treasures in the house, the bobblehead sums up not only David’s endless affection for his father but his own legacy, as well. Though some of the family history has been lost along the way, food has always been the Dopkin business, and David is the fourth generation of, as he puts it, “food purveyors and producers.”

While the story that his great-grandparents were in the meatpacking business is somewhat apocryphal, what’s certain is that his paternal grandparents, Ansela and Michael, opened the highly successful The Beef Inn on Smith Avenue in Pikesville in 1970, and later another outpost on Reisterstown Road. “My grandfather was supposed to be a silent partner with a couple of other guys,” recalls David, “and they were supposed to hire a manager, but the manager lasted six months, and because our family lived a block away, they got stuck running it.”

Food was a family affair. Says David, “My mother and father worked there with my grandparents, my aunts, my cousins, and Miss Shirley McDowell (who became the namesake for the southern Miss Shirley’s Café).”

Almost at birth, David was a part of the business, too. “I’ve been told for 38 years that it said, ‘It’s a boy,’ on the sign outside the Reisterstown Road restaurant when I was born,” he says. “The family also loves to say that I’d be in a playpen in the dry-goods room lining up the cans and the boxes.” His love of order, apparent in his home, carries through professionally, as well. “Today, I still go into Miss Shirley’s, and, if I’m doing inventory, I still like to line things up. There’s a lot of madness on Saturdays and Sundays, but when our very valued guests leave, every nook and cranny is put back together.”

From the playpen, David graduated to standing on milk crates and working the register at his father’s ever-growing enterprises, including a chain of bagel stores known as The Bagel Place; dressing up as the Easter bunny for Cal and Kelly Ripken’s private parties catered by Classic; and, eventually, working the summers at the Ravens’ training camp at McDaniel College before becoming director of food services at the Ravens’ permanent home at the Under Armour Performance Center.

“My father trained us that you get whatever anyone wants,” explains David. “Art Modell liked his kosher hot dog, David Modell liked a special banana Popsicle . . . or some players might want a special salad dressing. ‘No’ never entered our minds.” The best piece of advice he ever got from his dad? “He’d say, ‘Do it yesterday. Be proactive.’ I learned from him that you always want to be thorough and detail-oriented. If the weather is going to be bad, for example, you call the generator people first.”

Despite losing his mentor, David, who helped expand the Miss Shirley’s brand from Roland Park to downtown Baltimore and Annapolis, has been able to continue the success of a business that cracks 6,000 cage-free eggs on Sundays alone. “I’ve always thought how much I think like my father,” he says. “I knew what he was going to say before he said it. He may not be next to me, but I know what he’d do in certain situations.”

Brandy is quick to add that David is a success in his own right. “There is this perception that David is Eddie’s son, but David is the hardest-working person I know,” she says. “For years, he was getting up at 6 a.m. and running those businesses. We didn’t have a hiccup in the transition of my father-in-law going—he really prepared us.”

After Eddie’s death, David contemplated honoring his father’s passion for parties by making his father’s funeral (attended by the likes of Senators Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and former Ravens linebacker O.J. Brigance) celebratory instead of somber. “My father would have turned his funeral into a party,” says David. “He would have had orange yarmulkes for Shirley’s and green yarmulkes for Classic. He would have turned it into a production. I asked the people at [Sol] Levinson’s, ‘What do you think about us giving out Goetze’s Candy to end on a sweet note?’” Ultimately, David decided to stick to a strictly traditional service.

For now, however, the party continues at home. “Brandy is definitely the outgoing dance-at-seven-in-the-morning and get-down-with-the-kids kind of person,” says David. “And that kind of joy and laugher and zest for life has gone straight to my kids and makes me more open to being silly.”

What would Eddie say if he were still around? “If he could see me now, he’d say, ‘I love you and I’m proud of you—let’s take the kids to Disney World.’”

You’ve been trying to ignore it for a couple of years, but now you have to face the facts: Your home’s landscaping has gone from chic to shabby. The snow’s broken off countless azalea branches, the mulched beds have surrendered to an invasion of creeping charlie, and after you pruned the dead stuff off the old dogwood, it looks like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Yes, it’s time to think landscaping. And it may also be time to seek professional help.

Depending on the scope of the job, and your willingness to get dirt under your nails, there are several options.
If you envision a high-end makeover with a pool house, myriad garden paths, or a re-positioned driveway, you’ll want to call on a landscape architect. Once your new design is complete, the landscape architect will likely bid the construction and planting out to a contractor—a landscaping firm or a garden center with installation crews.

Another option is to go with a design/build firm like Bob Jackson Landscapes or Maxalea, which can set you up with a professional landscape designer to draw plans—from pool decks and pergolas—that the firm will then install itself. And most landscaping companies offer contracts to come back each year and maintain your yard.
If the job is simple, a visit to a garden center with a design arm, like Green Fields Nursery & Lanscaping Co. in Baltimore, might just do the trick. The Green Fields designers will help you sketch a plan for your garden, and even make a visit to your place, says general manager Peter Bieneman. Of course, you’ll be expected to buy your plant materials from the store.

It all sounds expensive—and it can be—but it needn’t be. While a design can cost as little as the designer’s hourly fee—licensed landscape architect Sarah Trautvetter of startup Traut Landscape Studio, for example, charges from $75 to $135 per hour—the fee might also be collected as a percentage of the total cost of the project.

Finally, if do-it-yourself is really your thing, become a master gardener. Once a gardener has completed the course offered through the University of Maryland Extension service, says Bieneman, “they’re usually inspired to go further.”
We’ve done some research and built a list of some of the best residential landscape solutions in the area. And part of that research was asking the firms with the most industry awards whom they saw as their worthiest adversaries in the market.

Our two-step plan for your yard? Read this. Then pick up the phone.

Blue Water Baltimore
Advocating sustainable and native gardens, Blue Water Baltimore is happy to help you plan an eco-friendly yard, even offering rebates for homeowners who follow the advice of its free water audits, available in Baltimore City and County. The nonprofit, which holds native-plant sales several times in the spring and fall, has horticulturists on staff, as well as a list of sustainable landscape designers they recommend. 3545 Belair Rd., 410-254-1577, bluewaterbaltimore.org.

Bob Jackson Landscapes
Landscape designer Bob Jackson’s design/build firm, whose trucks seem to be everywhere, takes on mostly larger residential and commercial jobs, as well as working with builders on site plans, and offering maintenance contracts. Influenced by English gardener Russell Page, who believed that every site “has a voice,” Jackson works closely with homeowners to ensure a look that is sustainable, functional, and reflects the personality of the space. 11436-H Cronridge Dr., Owings Mills, 410-356-1620, bjl-inc.com.

Campion Hruby
This Annapolis-based landscape architecture firm does a lot of work with contemporary architects, creating sustainable landscapes to complement modern designs, as well as jobs for clients looking for more traditional or formal solutions. The firm—which serves clients from Northern Virgina to Baltimore and the Eastern Shore—has worked in recent years with the Severn School on an overhaul that includes playing fields, a ropes course, and environmental improvements overlooking the Severn River. 26 South St., Annapolis, 410-280-8850, campionhruby.com.

Creative Land Design
While this full-service design/build firm creates environments influenced by owner Joe Cramer’s study of Japanese garden design, its specialty is “living” retaining walls. Using native boulders and plantings, the natural-looking walls help with nutrient uptake and groundwater retention while blending into the surrounding environment. 1736 Old Generals Hwy., Annapolis, 410-758-2455, creativelanddesignmd.com.

Green Fields Nursery & Landscaping Co.
More than a garden store, Green Fields has landscape architects and designers on staff to help you plan the garden of your dreams—even making a visit to your home to get the lay of the land. If warranted, the nursery will also help you contract with a designer or landscape architect. And they hold regular, free gardening classes on everything from houseplants to rose gardens. 5424 Falls Rd., 410-323-3444, greenfieldsnursery.com.

J.D. Outdoors
After working for the tree division of a prominent landscaping company, licensed tree expert Jason Davidov struck out on his own. A full-service tree company, J.D. Outdoors also designs and builds affordable landscapes for clients, and is an expert on deer-proofing. 5 Greenlea Dr., Pikesville, 443-691-3550.

Jean Mellott
Landscape architect and Roland Park resident Jean Mellott works with clients in the North Baltimore area, including many referred by Blue Water Baltimore’s water audit team. Working with native plants, she designs landscapes that deal with drainage and storm-water issues, along with providing aesthetic appeal. She also works with schools to help reduce asphalt surfaces and create rain gardens and learning environments. 18 Midvale Rd., 410-905-8689, jeanmellott.com.

K Gay and Associates
Trina Gay’s approach to landscape design is largely nostalgic. By channeling the pastoral spaces where she wandered as a girl on a family farm in Baltimore County, the landscape architect, who works out of her home, incorporates habitats and natural drainage systems, water gardens, brambles, and bird sanctuaries into her designs. A frequent subcontractor for Green Fields, Gay says she tries to re-create old Maryland landscapes with modern needs in mind. 410-483-8602, kgayassociates.com.

Mahan Rykiel Associates
While known best for urban planning and large projects for commercial and institutional clients, this award-winning landscape-architecture firm also designs residential gardens and master plans for homeowners. The Stieff Silver Building, 800 Wyman Park Dr., Ste. 100, 410-235-6001, mahanrykiel.com.

Maxalea
Its name morphed from Mac’s Azaleas (dating to the 1920s), this design/build firm, run by the four grandsons of the original Mac, employs both landscape architects and landscape designers, as well as construction crews to install landscape visions ranging from pool decks and outdoor kitchens to flower gardens. 900 Oak Hill Rd., Towson, 410-377-7500, maxalea.com.

Nature’s Artisans
This 12-year-old company serves residential clients with a staff that’s experienced in both traditional landscaping and environmentally sensitive restoration landscaping, but is best known for providing designs and installations that work with the local ecology. 13530 Manor Rd., Baldwin, 443-622-7076, natures-artisans.com.

Stone Hill Design Associates
This landscape architecture firm is familiar with the period homes and guidelines of Baltimore’s historic residential neighborhoods. Stone Hill specializes in landscape restoration, water features, and theme gardens, as well as sustainable design. 5704 Bellona Ave., 410-464-2000, stonehilldesignassociates.com.

Traut Landscape Studio
Principal Sarah Trautvetter left Graham Landscape Architecture to start this small design studio, which specializes in small urban spaces and what Trautvetter calls, “an aesthetic of efficiency.” 1124 Battery Ave., 410-980-0790, trautlandscapestudio.com.

Walnut Hill Landscape Company
This soup-to-nuts company specializes in high-end custom landscapes from country gardens and swimming pools to outdoor living spaces; many of its clients live in waterfront homes in Annapolis and on the Eastern Shore. Along with planning and installation, Walnut Hill offers maintenance contracts. 1563 St. Margaret’s Rd., Annapolis, 410-349-3105, walnuthilllandscape.com.

Master Gardener
The Master Gardener Program taught through the University of Maryland Extension service is for those deadly serious dirt-scratchers who want to turn their green thumb into 10 green fingers. Along with design advice, students are instructed in plant identification, soil health, composting, and sustainability. Beware, it’s a heady time commitment, with about 10 weeks of evening classes, demonstrations, and a volunteer requirement. Admission is by application. mastergardener.umd.edu.

Lacena “Candy” Carson wanders around the basement family room of her Georgian-style, Baltimore County estate—hammer in hand—performing an extremely familiar task: She’s tacking up plaques and prizes belonging to her husband, Dr. Ben Carson, the internationally-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon.

On this brisk fall night, Candy has fallen a bit behind in her efforts, as she hangs Carson’s 2007 honorary doctorate degree from Columbia University and his plaque from Baltimore magazine’s Top Doctors 2007, alongside the other honors that fill the walls, glass cases, and specially built niches throughout the residence.

The family room, where Carson likes to unwind over games of pool, ping pong, and foosball, is a sort of makeshift museum of the man known for his gifted hands, and Candy is both keeper and curator. A quick glance at the cases and walls reveals more than 50 honorary doctorate degrees from such institutions as Spelman College, Morgan State University, and Yale as well as certificates, trophies, and statues from numerous preeminent organizations.

“It took me about 12 hours to put all these up,” Candy says with a sweep of her arms around the room. “I had to lay them on the floor first to get the proportions just right. I wanted it to be art—not just a bunch of plaques on the walls—and I still have so many to put up that are still in storage.”

That’s two down for tonight with dozens more to go, because as soon as Candy hangs one award up, Carson has another bestowed upon him, including the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he won last year.

“You wonder why this house is so large,” jokes Carson’s mother, Sonya, whom Carson credits with his success and who lives in a third-floor suite of the 48-acre, eight-bedroom, 12-bathroom family home.

If these walls could talk, they would share the oft-told story of Carson’s hardscrabble beginnings in Detroit. The story goes that Sonya, who worked three jobs to support Ben and his brother Curtis, pushed her boys to great academic heights despite her own lack of education (Sonya’s formal schooling ended after third grade) and struggled to survive as a single mother. Carson was initially a poor student, but with his mother’s encouragement and insistence on education, he went on to graduate from Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School before, at 33, becoming the youngest-ever director of pediatric neurosurgery at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He gained worldwide recognition in 1987 as the principal surgeon in the landmark 22-hour separation of the Binder Siamese twins. (The surgery was the first time twins joined at the back of the head had been separated with both surviving.)

“Tell them that God is my publicist!”

While many doctors in the Baltimore area have earned international acclaim, not many have a fan base so strong that they can’t go out in public without being stopped for an autograph.

“It’s funny,” says Carson. “Years ago, somebody told me that someone at one of our competitor institutions was asking, ‘Who is Carson’s publicist? How does he get so much press?’ I said, ‘Tell them that God is my publicist!'” Carson chuckles at the memory. “I never sought any attention of any type,” he says. “But it has continued to come, and it’s clear that it’s never going to go away, so I make the most of it.”

One example of making the most of it: Carson gave television network TNT the green light to make a movie about his life: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, based on the bestselling book of the same name, will air on February 7, in conjunction with Black History Month. Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Carson. For more than a decade, various production companies have attempted to woo Carson into making a movie of his life, but the timing and artistic intentions never felt right to him—until now.

“I certainly didn’t want to do the movie too early,” says the 57-year-old. “I still had years to practice. Once you are the subject of a movie, it has a tendency to have an impact on your life and how people perceive you. I said to myself, ‘I’d rather do it as I’m approaching the end of my surgical career as opposed to 10 years ago.'”

And make no mistake, strictly entertaining viewers with his life story was not Carson’s goal.

“He didn’t agree to do this for the sake of entertainment,” says Gifted Hands executive producer Dan Angel. “The mission is that it will reach people from all walks of life across the country. He wants people to see his story not because of ego. He wants people to believe you can overcome anything with faith, with family, with a dream.”

Indeed, Carson’s story so inspired Cuba Gooding Jr. that the actor calls meeting the doctor for the first time “magical.” “My experiences [making the film] have changed me as a man and father,” he says. “And they will only continue to shape me.”

While the soft-spoken Carson is humble, he is also surprisingly happy to put his home on display as an obvious marker of his success.

“I don’t shy away from the fact that financially we’ve done well, and it’s not just from medicine,” he says. In addition to taking on close to 400 medical cases a year, Carson sits on the board of several for-profit corporations including The Kellogg Company and Costco Wholesale Corporation, and gives motivational speeches across the country. “I get lots of money to go around and make speeches,” says Carson. “And I’ve got real estate in different places. One of the points I like to make with young people is that you can do that without being an athlete or an entertainer.”

Carson feels the media reinforces the image of sports and entertainment as the only roads to riches for African-Americans. “Look at The Cosby Show,” he says. “You have a physician married to a lawyer, and they live in this okay place, but I never appreciated that the show that came on right after Cosby was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, in which these rappers get into their limos after they get out of their mansions and onto their private jets. You juxtapose that to what a doctor and lawyer are making, and it sends out the message that you can go out and get all this education but you’re not going to go anywhere with it.”

For the purposes of depicting his own odyssey—from humble roots in a cramped house in Detroit’s Deacon Street (“that was our dream house and it was not even as big as my garage is now”) to his current home, Carson felt it was important to show what money can buy when you achieve academic success.

“It’s not the home, it’s the people that make it a great place.”

“I don’t necessarily want kids to do something for money,” he explains, “but I want them to understand that when you develop yourself intellectually, you become valuable to society in many ways. You don’t have to take a vow of poverty.”

When the Carsons moved to their house in 2001 (from Howard County), they were actually only intending to buy a large plot of land.

“There’s no question I loved the idea of space,” says Carson. “Having grown up in places that were not very spacious with lots of people around, I liked the idea of having your own space, and the idea of being so secluded really appealed to us.”

But as they drove around the neighborhood, they found more than just a plot, they found a home. “I said, ‘Wow! This place has potential,'” Carson recalls. “‘We could do some things with this—we can add a portico, a circular driveway, and landscaping.'”

Carson was inspired, and so was Candy, who got busy on the interior as soon as they moved in. She knocked down walls on the first floor to create a more open floor plan and added a state-of-the-art kitchen where family and close friends (including Maryland State Schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick and husband, lumber magnate Lou, and Baltimore publisher, Steve Geppi and wife Mindy) gather for her famous vegetarian meals and after-church Sunday brunches.

While their home oozes European style and sophistication—with a hand-carved antique dining room buffet, Chippendale-style dining room chairs, crystal chandeliers, and high quality oil paintings—Candy, an inveterate bargain hunter, says she purchased much of the furniture at the Laurel Auction.

“Did I ever imagine I would live in a place like this?” she asks. “Of course not. Growing up poor, you try to be a good steward of the money you have.”

Since both Candy and Ben were raised poor, they have been careful to keep their three sons (Murray, 25, Ben Jr., 23, and Rhoeyce, 22) grounded. The boys grew up mowing the lawn, helping around the house, playing musical instruments, and watching the example of their parents, who give away and raise large sums of money for the Carson Scholars Fund. (To date, the Carson Scholars Fund has provided more than 3,400 scholarships to high-achieving students.)

“The one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the children of a lot of people we know who are quite affluent have not done well,” says Carson. “Being determined that our children would not grow up that way and that they would understand the value of hard work and the value of money, we’ve been very careful not to spoil them. Growing up in hardship was a tremendous advantage to me. It puts fire in your belly and gives you the will to keep going when people tell you you should quit.”

Their strong faith is also a guiding force. “We are very spiritual people so you will see a lot of Bibles around the house and things that are indicative of that,” says Carson, who attends a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Silver Spring. “I don’t have to be politically correct here.” He points to a stained-glass window in his foyer, a painting of him with Jesus, and his favorite proverb over the fireplace—”By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life”—Proverbs 22:4.

Carson also loves being a Baltimorean, although it took some time. “I came here in 1972 to look at Hopkins Medical School before renovations began, and I said, ‘Do people actually live here?'” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe how bad it was. Four years later, when I came back for residency, they had done a lot of work and have been going gangbusters ever since. I think Baltimore is one of the great success stories in our nation when it comes to urban renewal. Now, I love it here, and this would be my preferred place to live.”

Still, it’s the people, not the place, that matter to him most. “I have the most supportive and wonderful wife anyone could ask for,” says Carson. “I don’t get attached to things. If tomorrow I lose everything, and I’m back in a house like I grew up in, it won’t be the end of the world. It’s not the home, it’s the people that make it a great place.”