News & Reviews
Philadelphia Inquirer - March 20, 2011
Artist’s home is largely a studio
By Eils Lotozo
For the Inquirer
Brook Overline and her husband, John Jacobs, were living in a 1960s house in Gulph Mills when her art career began to take off. At the time, she was painting in a home studio fashioned by breaking through a wall to combine two small rooms.
"But there wasn’t enough space, and the studio had no sink," says Overline, whose large-scale watercolors depict intriguing arrangements of toys, everyday objects, and architectural elements painted in a style she calls abstract realism.
The couple decided to look for a house they could remodel to give Overline the kind of studio she needed.
"We looked for two years, but nothing was right," she says. "Then we stopped."
Overline had an epiphany: "I realized that what I really wanted was less house and more studio."
So they scrapped the buy-and-renovate idea and bought two acres adjoining a horse farm near Collegeville, where they’ve built exactly the kind of house Overline imagined.
The one-story, two-bedroom dwelling, a mix of modern and traditional in style, has 17-foot ceilings with exposed timber trusses that are not just decorative, but structural. There are hardwood floors throughout, made of hickory and pecan, and a big open-plan kitchen/living/dining space.
And, just as Overline imagined, her painting studio takes up a very large chunk of the total 3,000 square feet.
The artist credits architect Michael Lehnkering, of MSL Associates in Chester Springs, with making her unorthodox vision a reality.
"I had very specific ideas about the house," says Overline. "Within 10 days, he came back with a design, and he nailed it."
Ground was broken in July 2009. Jacobs worked with the builder to oversee construction, and Overline attended to the interior details. They moved in just 10 months later, in the spring of 2010.
One of Overline’s briefs was to make the house as environmentally friendly as possible. So an energy-efficient heat pump provides heating and cooling, and a large solar panel - built in a spot near the house that gets maximum sunlight - supplies some of the electricity needs.
There are ceiling fans throughout the house, and the windows (many and large) are all equipped with energy-conserving honeycomb shades.
Overline calls her roomy new studio - which opens off the living room through a set of French doors and also has its own separate entrance - "a dream come true."
There is space for a desk, a drafting table, an easel, a sink, and a worktable to hold her paints and brushes.
She has room for flat files and shelves to display the collections of toys, games, and figurines she uses in her art, which includes a new series of small-scale works on paper. And she has a big walk-in closet that holds supplies and a sound system for playing music while she works.
"It’s so quiet here," she says of the house’s location, down a long drive from a sparsely traveled back road. "There was so much traffic where we lived in Gulph Mills. I really wanted more quiet, and that’s what I got."
She also wanted more light, and that she has in plenty thanks to a floor-to-ceiling set of windows that takes up almost half of a wall of the studio. Its long, cushioned window seat has become a favorite perch for cats Lucky, Louise, and Kippur, who watch birds at the feeders outside.
"The light in this room is so fantastic, I don't mind being inside so much during the winter," says Overline, an avid cyclist who hits the road most days when the weather is good. "The studio is so bright, I don’t need to turn on a light all day."
That holds true for most of the rest of the house, as well, where three sets of sliding-glass doors offer maximum access to the outdoors and picturesque views of a stable, meadows, and the neighboring farm’s resident horses.
The front door opens into a large foyer whose walls are hung with Overline’s paintings.
If the space looks like an art gallery, it was designed to, says Overline, who graduated from Moore College of Art and Design and did graduate work at Tyler School of Art, but put aside her art as she married, divorced, raised a family, and ran a business. She began painting seriously again 15 years ago, after she met Jacobs, who works in sales.
As you might expect from an artist, Overline, whose work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, says she obsessed over the home’s decorative details.
"I must have spent hundreds of hours finding the right light fixtures and kitchen-drawer pulls," she says with a laugh. (Those pulls? They’re stainless steel and glass, to complement the room’s iridescent glass-tile backsplash.)
Now, that the house is finished, Overline finds some of its design motifs working their way into her paintings.
For example, the grids she often incorporates in her pieces now resemble the pattern of the basket-weave stone tiles that surround the fireplace in the living room.
"In so many ways," she says, "this house is like an extension of my artwork."