Watermelon House

"We love color," said Tom Healy, flashing metallic blue toenails.

Healy lives in the house on Q Street NW with the gigantic slice of watermelon painted on the side, along with Wade Wilson and Robert Banaszak.

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In the few years since it was painted, the mural has become a neighborhood landmark. "Everybody loves it," Healy said. "When kids see it, they scream, 'Watermelon house!' "

It's particularly fabulous at night, he adds, when the "slightly fluorescent streetlights make it pop."

The inspiration was accidental. Banaszak, the communications director for the American Academy of HIV Medicine, and Wilson, who owns W2, a computer consulting firm, painted it "when the painters did the front of the house fire-engine red and the side came out like Pepto-Bismol," Healy said. "So they grabbed black and pink and green and painted a watermelon."

Banaszak and Wilson actually own the house, said Healy, a law student at George Washington University. They bought it from the church at the corner, which used it for weddings and wakes. "They were hoping the weddings canceled out the bad juju."

The art continues inside, where Wilson hand-painted the fireplace mantel. "Wade's really creative," Healy said. A gnarled tree, another Wilson touch, covers a purple wall in the bright green master bedroom, branches snaking onto the ceiling.

"We don't consider ourselves artists," Healy said. "We just can't stand bland colors."

His own alpine mural on the shed behind the house is a work in progress. It's mainly at the waving-arms-around-in-description stage, but he's thinking mountains wrapping up into the side of the house . . . and kites.

But of all things, why a watermelon?

"We're all big fruits," he said with a hoot.

Paradise Found in Petworth

You have to be more than 6 feet tall to peep over the wall off 13th Street NW and catch a glimpse of Edward and Juliet Gill Cunningham's patch of paradise in Petworth.

The wall, which forms the backdrop to their porch and deck, belongs to neighbor "Miss Lily," said Edward Cunningham, who first asked her permission to paint the wall white. When Cunningham's wife was smitten with a photo of Hawaii and started discussions with Silver Spring muralist Ronald Shaw, Cunningham again approached Miss Lily, who was unperturbed. "I don't care. I can't see it," she told him.

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That was about 12 years ago. The Hawaiian scene now covers some 30 feet of wall, becoming more whimsical each summer with the addition of mermaids and lions and a rainbow studded with bits of glass to refract the sun.

"Every year, the artist is over here doing something or other," Cunningham said.

He just finished the fence around the hot tub. Last year, he did the cabana.

Cunningham, a night manager at Safeway who studied architecture in college, and his wife, a counselor at the District's H.D. Woodson High School, bought the house in 1990. They gutted it to create a hyper-modern space filled with white leather, art works, and a concrete fish pond with Miami-style spot-lit fountains under the staircase.

A 16-by-12-foot koi pond, stocked with fish Cunningham has raised from babies, is set into a deck outside the back door. The fish roil the water when he scatters food across the surface, tails flashing gold and orange. "My daughter used to sit on the side and dangle her feet," he said. Presumably that was before the fish grew to the size of small sharks.

Surrounding the pond and the hot tub are tables, chairs and benches. "A lot of people come to visit," Cunningham said. "They say, 'I feel like I'm in another world.' "

His favorite part? "My goodness," he said, gazing around his tropical hideaway. "Relaxing in the evening time when the lights come on."

This story was first published in the Washington Post

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post

A Touch of Tuscany

For decades, the lot beside the old house on East Capitol Street was the neighborhood basketball court, straggly with weeds and resounding with whoops and thumps from kids tossing balls into the hoop affixed to the neighbor's side wall.

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Then Connie and E. Linwood "Tip" Tipton arrived and restored the decaying circa-1902 beaux-arts home with its terra cotta tiled roof and impressive array of gables, bays, keystones, brackets and pediments. They also restored the broad porch, set Charleston-style on the side of the house. Down came the hoop, and out came the weeds. In went a new aggregate-edged flagstone patio and big raised garden beds.

The only eyesore was that brick wall. "We finally decided on some sort of trompe l'oeil, maybe a garden," said Connie Tipton, chief executive of the International Dairy Foods Association. "But how do you paint a garden on a wall and make it look natural?"

She clipped a stack of magazine photos of gardens and gave them to Andre Kouznetsov of Buon Fresco Wall Artistry in Alexandria, "and he went from there."

What emerged was a lush Tuscan garden that carries the eye past shrubs, statuary and flower borders to a vista of mountains under a hazy blue sky with sunset-tinged clouds.

Sitting on a garden bench are Nicholas and Lena, the next-door neighbor's children, added as sweet payback for letting the Tiptons use their wall.

To make the 16-by-45-foot mural work with the house, "the architectural design was incorporated into the painting," said Tip Tipton, a former chief executive of the dairy association and the man behind the milk-mustache campaign.

"The artist picked up the stonework and keystones over the front windows and the dentil moldings at the roofline," he said.

Kouznetsov even incorporated the aggregate edging along the patio, extending it into the mural's winding pathways. Then he daubed in bits of whimsy, such as the wine bottle tossed behind a bush.

"He told us it would last 100 years," Connie Tipton said. "But we'll never be here," she added, clinking wine glasses with her husband and envisioning, perhaps, a real Tuscan retirement.

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post

A Garden Variety Masterwork

"What's this article about again?" asks Evelyn Nef, standing in the foyer of her Georgetown home. Not because she had forgotten but because she wants to hear it directly, instead of filtered through her assistant.

"Murals in private homes around the city," she's told. "And you're the top!"

"You're the top," she sings, doing a little soft-shoe down the hall. "Noël Coward!"

It's early afternoon, and the sun is shining brilliantly. She doesn't see anyone before noon, her assistant explained. She works out every morning. "Weights and stretches," Nef said. She'll be 95 next month.

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"Come into my back yard and see a marvel," she said, leading the way through the house. And there it is, surrounded by magnolias and climbing roses, the only Marc Chagall mosaic in a private home in the world.

At the top she points out "Orpheus and his lute, Pegasus and images from Greek mythology." Below are European refugees coming across the ocean, and in the right corner she and her husband sit in the shade of a tree.

Chagall was a good friend of her third husband, historian John Ulrich Nef, whom she married in 1964.

"Every summer, we went to France and saw the Chagalls," she recalled. The people, not the paintings. "We always went to the Hotel du Cap -- they'd come to get away from the tourists in summer. In the morning, Marc would paint and my husband would write and Valentina and I would gossip. We became like a family.

"When he'd come to New York, where Matisse was his dealer, he'd come to visit us in Washington. He loved the village of Georgetown and shopping at Woolworth's for new pencils and colored crayons."

It was something of a hostess gift, the mural. When he proposed it for the garden, she was imagining a plaque of some sort, "a little 8-by-10-inch thing to hang," she described with her hands.

"I never dreamed we'd have to build a wall."

The mosaic was flown over from France in 10 panels and attached to the wall with bronze pins so it can be moved. "When I die, it will go to the National Gallery. The present plan is to put it in the sculpture garden," Nef said.

"When it was done, Marc came and the French ambassador and the society person," she said. "It was a very big deal."

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post

I See a Mural in Your Future

"I've been waiting for you for 10 years!" Pam Marcon trilled in welcome. That's how long friends have been urging her to tell the press about her murals. You would think the Arlington artist, who is also an astrologer, would have seen a sign.

Ten years ago: That's when her computer crashed and she decided to paint the back of the house. "I started at the back, and within eight hours, I had the first one done," she said.

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The neighbors liked it and asked her to do the sides, too. But commissions were rolling in and the computer was back up, so it took eight years to complete the other three walls -- all, that is, but a little waterfall beside the front door that went on hold while she painted three airplanes for this spring's Crystal City Flight art show. It is a neck-breaking sight, particularly in winter when the trees are bare and the sides of the house are visible to passersby. She supplements the show in warmer months by lining up canvases in front of the porch.

Marcon has been painting since 1972, when a knee injury sidelined her dream of becoming a Rockette. There was another stab at show biz in 1979, when she joined Ringling Brothers as a showgirl, but she couldn't hack the close quarters. "I ran away from the circus," she said.

She has lived here 32 years, and as expected with starving artists, the house has begun a gentle decay. As is expected with artists, starving and otherwise, boundless creativity remains. So the house, inside and out, is a canvas.

The crumbling stucco walls add texture to the mural; cantilevered chunks have become mountain crags; gouges are chutes for waterfalls. Trees grow up the walls, covering this and that, and the tumble-down basement stairwell is a grotto.

Beside her "victory garden" -- planted with, she ticks off, "50 tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, onions, radish and corn. Ooh, and sunflowers!" -- is a shed that's becoming a Greek temple, with columns.

While she's adept at such realism, her passion is the "neo-primitive landscapes" that cover her house and her canvases. "Recession art. It doesn't cost a lot of money."

This story first appeared in the Washington Post