Little Cabin in the Woods: Getting in touch with nature
Imagine yourself in the perfect setting, a place where you feel the most relaxed. For some people, a secluded beach comes to mind; for others, a mountain peak. For interior designer Ellen Kennon, living and working in New York City, the perfect setting in her mind was far from the Manhattan skyline. Kennon, who grew up in Lake Charles, envisioned herself happiest reclining in a hammock, surrounded by towering trees, near a winding creek.
“After more than four years in New York, I needed to feel connected to nature,” says Kennon, who called a real estate agent in St. Francisville, a place she had fallen in love with after visiting only once twenty years earlier. Soon Kennon was the owner of seven acres of untamed woods near town, the first property she looked at.
Though she had never designed a house before, Kennon decided to design the house herself in order to keep costs down, loosely modeling it on a typical Louisiana plantation caretaker’s cottage. She also wanted to keep the home small enough to build on a tight budget.
When the creative process began, Kennon had only two definite requirements—a big fireplace and a great shower. She achieved both goals in beautiful ways. The dominant feature of the house is a fireplace on the scale of a grand mountain lodge, which opens onto the combined living room and kitchen. Another fireplace in back warms the expansive porch on chilly evenings. Not one, but two, extraordinary showers add character to the home. One shower is outside on the deck. The other is a “Eurobath,” in which the shower takes up the whole room.
After the site was cleared and the house under construction, Kennon’s father gave her a hammock as a gift. “It was not until I hung the hammock in the woods near the creek that I realized I had found my perfect place, the one I dreamed about in New York.”
“Nature is a tonic, it’s healing,” says Kennon in the forest home she now shares with her daughter Alexandra, who Kennon raised in the house. The colors of nature inspired her to create a new line of interior and exterior paints for her clients. Full Spectrum Paints, which began with a collection called Nature’s Pallet, grew into a booming business for Kennon and has been featured in national magazines.
Kennon believes everything about our surroundings affects our lives and emotions. She enlisted the help of Feng Shui practitioner Wyming Sun to help her arrange her home in a way that complements every aspect of her life and work.
Sun recommended that Kennon change the color of the hallway to a water color to improve travel in her life. She used her own paint color, Ashen Green. “He told me to put some red in the living room and it would solve problems with my neighbors, and it worked.” Sun also recommended using colors of fire around the mantle. Fortuitously, a well-known artist friend, Hunt Slonem, gave Kennon a painting of the archangel Sandalphon in fiery yellow that is perfect for the space.
Other angels and deities occupy prominent places in the home, including the Asian goddess of mercy Quan Yin. “Quan Yin and Sandalphon both help you improve your ability to receive,” says Kennon. She feels that she has received many blessings in her career and personal life, in part because she visualized her perfect place and turned it into reality. ✦
