An Artist's Palette

These longtime renters celebrate homeownership by freely bringing tons of color to their garden, porch, and home.

- RORY EVANS

Fanciful Flowers

Relocating from New York to Mississippi has given Kate Donovan (kate-donovan.com) space for a home studio, where she adorns wood plates, terra-cotta saucers, and tiny matchbooks with botanical designs (she also makes vegetables, like the pea pod and its curlicue stem, out of copper).

Sometimes, you have to listen hard for messages from the universe. Other times, there’s simply no missing them. That was the case for Kate Donovan and Leslie Joblin when they were deciding where to live after holing up for much of the pandemic in State College, PA, where Kate grew up and Leslie was finishing grad school. They had heard through a friend that a charming house was about to hit the market in Water Valley, MS—a town they loved to visit when in the area to see Leslie’s family—so they decided on a whim to take a look.

They were immediately drawn to the lush green garden, blue front porch, red front door, and the cute carvings of cat heads atop two of the front gate pickets. “That detail felt like it was calling for us,” Leslie says. (They have rescued four cats together.) The red front door also felt like a sign: Red doors were a symbol for the Bloomsbury Group—a collective of artists and writers cofounded by Virginia Woolf—a subject over which Kate and Leslie first bonded. (The group figured in Leslie’s PhD work on modernist interiors.)