While children typically learn about color by playing with crayons and paper, Katherine “Katty” Mears followed a different path. As a little girl, she honed an eye for hues through the art of flower arranging under her mother’s tutelage. “At the age of six, I was entering flower shows. It made me learn colors and combinations of colors. I’ve always gravitated toward color; it makes me happy,” says Mears, a past-president of The Garden Club of Virginia. “And I think the older I’ve gotten, the bolder the colors I like.”

Those lessons from her youth have never left her. Throughout the Eastville, Va., home, which she and her late husband built in 1952 and dubbed Kendall Grove Point, vivid hues and bold animal prints mingle with antiques and contemporary pieces, mostly discovered during her travels to Africa, New Zealand, Europe, and the Caribbean. Decorations are continually in flux. “I get tired of looking at the same thing,” she says. “I probably redecorate or repaint a room a year. It’s a work in progress.”
The five-bedroom structure, situated on a 600-acre property along Mattawoman Creek, is on a working farm that has been in the Mears family for three generations. “I moved to the Eastern Shore from Richmond as a bride of nineteen,” says Mears. “I’d never even heard of the Eastern Shore before. It took seven hours and two ferry rides to get here. I thought I had gone to Europe or something. I kept thinking, ‘I don’t know about this place…’ Now I wouldn’t leave for anything.”

Since the home was built, she has guided the house through four additions, decorating and redecorating it herself. he most recent addition transformed the house’s playroom into a combination sunroom/living room. Then Mears added a separate entrance, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Completed three years ago, it is currently being used as guest quarters. The new sunroom lives up to Mears’s criteria: “Anything bright I like.” A lemon-green couch, flanked by a pair of traditional wing chairs covered in a royal blue fabric with yellow flowers, sits before walls painted an electric granny apple green. “When I got ready to paint the room this color, I thought everybody was going to drop dead,” Mears says, laughing. “But I go down to the islands every winter so I wanted something that reminded me of the Caribbean.”
The house’s porch was originally screened for summer, until Mears got “sick and tired of wiping up after a rain.” She claimed it for year-round use by wrapping it in windows. She painted the ceiling “Yorktown green” and the walls a buttery yellow. A silkscreen rendering of palm fronds and bamboo furnishings infuse the room with an island feel even on the dreariest days.

Mears’s choice of paintings throughout her home reflects her deep affection for local artists. Above the lemon-green couch hangs a painting of elephants by Eastern Shore artist Guy Wilkins. Onancock artist Miriam Riggs painted intertwined giraffes in black on a white wall, giving it the look of an engraving. Between the giraffes is a large Venetian mirror, from her parents’ Richmond home. Above the island-inspired bamboo bed in the guest bedroom hangs a painting of calla lilies by Eastern Shore painter Jenny Floyd.

Directing the interior style of her house has been an independent journey for Mears, who considers herself lucky that her husband always left décor decisions in her hands. “I had totally free rein,” she says, and encourages her daughters to do the same. “Two people trying to decorate a house is one too many.”

Mears also works mostly solo in her four gardens, situated on all sides of her home so they can be viewed from almost every room. Her circular drive offers a display of flowering shrubs—camellias, rhododendrons, and azaleas—along with spring-heralding bulbs and perennials. Twice Kendall Grove Point has been a highlighted destination during Historic Garden Week on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
Mears admits her eclectic style may not be for the faint of heart. Last year she received some interesting feedback from a garden tour guest about the flamboyant, abstract painting that hangs in the living room, which even Mears herself admits is “kind of wild.” “I was back in the kitchen, and this man came in and said, ‘I don’t know, I think the woman was drunk when she bought that painting over the mantel.’ I said, ‘Well you are looking at her, and I wasn’t.’”

Her friends will admit that there is no painting Mears in a creative corner; the surprises of her interior decorating, as well as personal style are endless. “I am brave,” says Mears. “I have fun with my house. People may say my choices are crazy, but that’s OK. I’m not a shy, retiring person.”

Freelancer Donna Bozza Rich wrote “Train Spotting” in the November & December 2002 issue of CL.