Above the brown and white bedroom is the top floor, which houses the sleeping and lounge areas for P. Allen Smith’s nieces and nephews. A bright pink and white checkered runner welcomes you up to the sitting area (my apologies for that noisy image but it was all I got with my iPhone!). Across from the lounge are four twin beds and a full bath. Two dormer window nooks offer beautiful views of the Arkansas River Valley.
One of the most inviting spots in P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home was the screened sleeping porch at the back of the house. In his introduction before the tour, he mentioned one of the designers wanted to add a fourth bed to the porch, but he nixed that idea, saying, “We don’t want it to look like a tuberculosis ward!” Below is a shot of the three beds in the sleeping porch, which is the top level of the two-level porch.
Below: This room also has a gorgeous copper bathtub (not a lot of privacy, obviously!) and Sue just had to try it out (yes, she is tiny and yes, the tub is huge).
Below: On the same floor in the front of the house was a guest bedroom with two beds with a crisp color palette of brown, beige and white. I think the two paintings of clouds above the beds might have been done by P. Allen Smith.
Below: Corner desk area
Before we toured P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home outside of Little Rock, Arkansas on December 7, we had the pleasure of meeting Mimi San Pedro (top photo, middle), chief operating and marketing officer for Hortus, Ltd., the multimedia marketing company that oversees the P. Allen Smith brand. She introduced us to Heidi Berry, of the Berry Family of Nurseries, who has teamed up with P. Allen Smith to offer a special holiday collection of hand-harvested, hand-tied wreaths, door swags, table runners and garlands.
Heidi explained to us how she met P. Allen and invited him to visit the Berry Family of Nurseries in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. She told us that their greenery boughs are harvested by hand from the lowest tree branches, which encourages trees to grow taller and stronger. No trees are cut down in the process. The products are made from Noble Fir, Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir. Natural elements such as juniper berries, pine cones, incense cedar, canella berries and white pine boughs adorn the designs.
I shot the image of P. Allen and Heidi in front of a candy cane decoration outside the “tractor barn” before we began the tour of the house. Below the photo is a video of Smith touring the nursery where the greenery is assembled.
Speaking of the tractor barn, click here to see a slide show of how Smith took a standard metal building and refaced it to look like an old wood barn. Very clever!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
GIVE ‘EM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT