Greensboro’s Next Wave

One simply needs to look around town to realize that Greensboro is on the move — the Next Wave of young and creative people are already shaping the Gate City’s future. We thought you’d like to meet a few of them

Photographs by Mark Wagoner

Cooking Up Change

Table Seven needs a birthday dessert, a pavlova.

On the hot side of the counter that divides the cooks from the customers at Chez Genèse (pronounced zhu-NEZ), owner-chef Kathryn Hubert centers a beige cake made from meringue on a small white plate — its magnificent foamy peaks and furrows baked into place by a brief encounter with a furious oven.

She slaps the creation with a heavy spoonful of homemade whipped cream. Her gloved hands rain blueberries and blackberries over the gleaming pond. The inky berries land with soft plops.

She rocks a chef’s knife on cutting board to yield juicy geodes of strawberries, then she upends a tin canister of powdered sugar and makes it snow over crags of red and blue.

“Runner!”

Server Ben Lugo, who describes himself as autistic, carefully lifts the plate from the counter and takes a few steps to present it to the honoree.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, I forget the rest of the song, buhhhhhhht . . . HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!”

What Lugo lacks in words, he makes up for with enthusiasm. Laughter bathes the moment.

Lugo, 22, laughs, too.

Behind the counter, the oval-faced owner Hubert, who traps her long brown hair under a trucker cap, frees a giggle. She is prematurely calm at 30.

“That’s great,” she says of Lugo’s improvisation. “I’ve never seen him do that before.”

Ten years ago, when she was chipping away at a degree in hospitality management at UNCG, Hubert imagined her future.

She could see herself leaving Greensboro for Oregon.

Maybe Portland. Someplace awash in young people who wanted to make the world a better place.

Sustainable. Fair. Inclusive.

Those were her values.

But another thought tapped at her mind as she pondered what might be elsewhere: There was plenty of work to be done here.

“There were people walking by me every day that needed help,” she says.

Living on the cusp of campus and downtown, she saw homeless people frequently. She worked in a community garden in the Glenwood neighborhood, where families prized the vegetables that sprang from the dirt. She tutored children in an after-school program run by the nonprofit Hope Academy and, later, in a similar one operated by the Autism Society of North Carolina. That’s where she met Joey, a profoundly autistic boy whom she describes as “very sweet, very in tune.”

Hubert was on familiar ground. She’d grown up with three male cousins with autism, a wide-ranging condition marked by difficulty in making social connections.

Portland would have to wait. After graduating from UNCG, she stuck around for Joey. She became his full-time assistant at his elementary school, a paid position in the school system. 

The job with Joey was rewarding — for him, and for her — but when Hubert looked ahead, as she is prone to do, she saw a sad truth: The Earth is, indeed, flat for people like Joey, who often fall off the edge once they leave high school and find that job opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are practically nil.

Once again, she pitched herself into the future and saw a solution: a French cafe that would employ people with intellectual and developmental disabilities — folks like Joey and her cousins.

Hubert was a foodie from way back. Coming of age in the mountain college town of Boone, she cooked at The Inn at Crestwood and Hound Ears Club. She bagged a degree in culinary arts from Caldwell Community College and spent a year volunteering in a resort kitchen in the Burgundy region of France.

The experience left a lasting impression.

“I fell in love with French food and culture, and how generous French people are with their time. They’re very relational,” she says. “When they invite you into their homes, there’s no time limit on it.”

Her experience propelled her to study hospitality at UNCG, which led her, in turn, to meet Joey, which led her to understand that she could whisk together everything she had learned — about food, about people with disabilities, about being the change she wished for — to create an inclusive workplace.

“This has been a dream a long time in the making,” she says.

She toned her restaurant chops by working in catering at the Iron Hen and, later, by helping to get the now-shuttered Morehead Foundry complex off the ground.

She cultivated a coterie of advisers: an attorney, an interior decorator, small business owners and fellow chefs.

The stove jockeys devised a menu rooted in Gallic ethos.

“The French don’t cram a lot of ingredients into their food,” she says. “They pick a few and let them shine.”

The breakfast-and-lunch offerings would glow with fresh baguettes, croissants and brioche from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem.

House-made egg dishes would wear simple accessories: asparagus and chèvre; smoked salmon and dill crème fraîche; spinach, roasted red potatoes and Camembert.

Strawberry crepes would travel with crème fraîche or Nutella.

Ham and butter on a chewy baguette would equal a sandwich.

A fancy sandwich might combine olive tapenade, fresh tomatoes, goat cheese, sliced chicken, pepperoncini and arugula on a baguette.

A tart might require just potatoes, thyme and red onions.

Chocolate mousse would leave tiny air pockets in a small mason jar and wear a fluffy hat of whipped cream.

Hubert stitched together financial backing from various sources: family and friends; online crowdfunding campaigns; grants from downtown development advocates; and a personal loan of $30,000.

She secured a location on the southern hem of downtown — an airy space which last held PB&Java, a sandwich and coffee shop near the corner of South Elm and Bain streets, a block removed from Gate City Boulevard.

She didn’t have to advertise for applicants. After local media announced her plans, emails rolled in from people who wanted a job. If parents contacted her on their children’s behalf, Hubert asked them to have their children contact her directly. Applicants had to want it for themselves. She wasn’t in the business of handing out jobs. She was in the business of hiring people who could do the job, never mind their disabilities.

She conducted interviews, culled the best candidates, and arranged for job training with lots of role-playing and explicit instructions on how to read and react to social cues, a common deficit among people with developmental issues.

Among the lessons: Do not interrupt when customers are deep in conversation; and when diners set their plates aside or their silverware on their plates, assume they’re probably be finished. There were moments of levity.

Once, when Hubert played the role of a diner, a would-be server asked if she wanted dessert. Sure, she said. What are your favorites? Impulsively, he proceeded to tick off a litany of sweets that weren’t on the menu.

She then diplomatically reminded him that the context called for a list of confections that were available to diners.

One of her cousins helped with the training.

“He said, ‘Hey, I’m Zachary. I’m autistic, and I’m not ashamed of it,’” she says. “There was an immediate connection between him and the staff because they thought, ‘He understands.’”

Hubert mobilized an army of volunteers to blanche the restaurant’s interior to simple chic. They painted the walls white, wrapped support columns in rope, hung sail cloth drapes in the many windows, and striped the walls with shiplap siding and floating shelves that breathed with terra cotta pots, feathery ferns and trailing tendrils.

A friend hung a banner of brown butcher paper near the front door. In wispy script, she translated the cafe’s French name:

“Chez Genèse, A Place of New Beginnings.”

Hubert’s mom and dad, Lori and Barry, came from Boone and camped in the construction zone, lending muscle and experience. Convinced that she could never pay back, only pay forward, their love, Hubert planted one white chair in a sea of black bistro seats. The first person to occupy that seat every day gets a meal on the house, along with a brief history of the reason behind the largesse.

“It seemed like a good way to share the story, in a practical way,” says Hubert.

She opened her breakfast-lunch cafe in late-October, the same week that A Special Blend, a coffee shop that also employs adults with cognitive disabilities, opened on West Market Street near Starmount Forest (see this month’s Life’s Funny, page 17).

It was a coincidence. But Hubert believes the events are rooted in the same time and place. It’s a time, she says, when people who are inclined to quash employment barriers for those with disabilities have successful role models like Wilmington coffee shop-turned-franchise Bitty and Beau’s.

Greensboro, she says, is fertile ground for people like that.

“There is, I think, a sense of community in Greensboro that isn’t in other places,” she says. “I think there are a lot of businesses and individuals here who care about making an impact, and I’m honored to be a part of that.”

More than half.

That’s how many of Hubert’s 22 employees deal with evident disabilities: autism, Down syndrome, lower-than-average IQs, and other conditions that make processing information a challenge.

Brianna Oliver, 21, says she deals with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression. She graduated from high school, tried college for a while, and lost a job as a preschool assistant before coming to Chez Genèse.

“I’m either all too much at once, or not engaging enough. It’s hard to be myself with people because I feel like they won’t want to be friends with me,” she says.

At Chez Genèse, she says, she can be herself, knowing that her bosses — Hubert and her neuro-typical lieutenants — understand and can help if needed. As a result, Oliver has relaxed into her job as server, a job she wanted so she could improve her social skills.

Katya Hedrick, 25, a prep cook, left her parents and a job helping with horseback tours in Boone to see if she would like living on her own.

“I already knew I wasn’t good at talking to people, so I’m learning to communicate better. When I came to Greensboro, I had to talk more,” she says deliberately. 

The change was scary, she admits, but chocolate croissants and supportive co-workers have made it easier. Also, they have helped her refine one of her best skills: hugging.

“This is like a big family that tries to help one another,” she says.

Lugo, the birthday crooner, also tried college. It didn’t work out, he says, so he now works four jobs, three in food service.

Ask him what’s good about working at Chez Genèse, and he shifts to the hypothetical second-person to answer.

“If you were a jerk, or pardon my French, an asshole, you would say the pay and no tips,” he says, referring to the slightly-better-than-minimum-wage pay and no tipping in the French tradition.

But because Lugo is not a sarcastic asshole, he will say no such thing. Instead, he will say that Chez Genèse has allowed him to see a future job that might involve his passion: games. Online games, board games, trading card games. He’s good at memorization. Show him the rules, and watch him go.

“It got me thinking, maybe I’ll open a store and help people,” he says.
— Maria Johnson

Katei Cranford – Community Advocate

A tireless purveyor of everything local, Greensboro gadfly Katei Cranford wears a lot of hats, none of them boring: Event organizer. Historic preservationist. City council candidate. Yes! Weekly columnist. Radio DJ. Social media flamethrower.

Where does the 34-year-old get all her energy? “There’s a certain inspiration that comes with the frustration of not necessarily being a city that has a lot going on.”

Many will know her best from her long-running Tuesday afternoon radio program on WUAG that spotlights musical groups playing around North Carolina.

Instant Regrets and Basement Life are local faves but Katei confesses, “A lot of the bands I’m most excited about are coming out of Raleigh right now.” That’s because a viable music scene is predicated on a platform of appropriate entertainment venues, so she’s often engaged in nudging developers into expanding creative outlets and performance spaces. “It can be really fun here and I want to share that. And everybody else I talk to does too,” she says. 

Things are looking up on the music scene, Cranford says: “When you get solid touring bands coming here there’s an extra element of passion and enthusiasm. We don’t take them for granted.”

Like they say: Right what you know. — Billy Ingram

Witneigh Davis & Giovanni Ramadani – Founders Greensboro Fashion Week 

Lights! Cameras! Music! Yes, Greensboro Fashion Week has all the glamour and excitement one would expect from a runway show, but for founders Witneigh Davis and Giovanni Ramadani, it has always been as much about substance as style, starting with their initial vision in the fall of 2014. 

New York Fashion Week, says Giovanni, a former model, had become “watered down” and rife with pay-to-play participants.” Gotham “got outside the major designers they’re showcasing.” Talent was secondary. Greensboro, on the other hand, boasted “textiles driving industry back in the ’60s,” says Witneigh, a former stylist with marketing chops. “Knowing that the history and roots were here in the fashion world, we just kind of resurfaced in a modern way.”

The two entrepreneurs saw an opening to fill the fashion gap in the Southeast, between New York and Miami, by showcasing local designers with the help of sponsors, such as Greensboro’s Foreign Cars Italia and no less than Bentley, among others. After all, as Witneigh points out, clothes and cars are “a natural fit.” She and Giovanni also noticed that Greensbororians sported their own polished and casual, if a bit subdued style, and could be encouraged to take more daring sartorial steps.

Fast-forward five years, and the two entrepreneurs, both of whom who will be 32 this year, will tell you GFW has morphed beyond expectations, becoming a true platform for fashion. Designers — from all over the world —  are vying for the opportunity they’ve provided. “We had over 100 applicants last year and we only had room for eight,” says Giovanni. “We wanted to pick the best ones.” And they are hands-on. Witneigh says the two constantly communicate with the designers by Skype, every step of the way before the razzmatazz in fall that includes multiple shows at various hip locations around town. (Last year they snagged a hangar at Honda Jet for one of their shows.)

But Witneigh and Giovanni haven’t stopped there: They started a modeling camp for kids in the summer, the first, Giovanni believes, in North Carolina, to teach aspiring models the ins and outs of the industry and how to comport themselves professionally so as to be agency-ready. (Some were signed on at last year’s Fashion Week.) The dynamic duo are also putting their energies behind Twin City Fashion Week in Winston-Salem this spring and a daylong Summer Show before the GFW revs up again in October.

They’re excited that the event is becoming a destination. “That’s the thing,” says Giovanni. “We want to make Greensboro cool. We want to make Greensboro fashionable. We want to make Greensboro fun.” — Nancy Oakley

Maurice Hicks – Filmmaker

It takes a visionary to see life’s big picture, then project it on the big screen. Just months ago, UNCG film grad Maurice Hicks, 32, completed a feature film he wrote and directed, Rap and Rhyme, an underbelly exam of the music biz, which he says is “an accurate reflection of who I am as a person, an artist, and what I’m capable of.” As a financial and artistic roll of the dice, “it was absolutely terrifying but we did it.”

Timing seems right. His highly acclaimed short from a few years ago was recently picked up by an entertainment channel, a circumstance so rare as to be almost unheard of. An unflinching commentary on American racial injustice, A Letter To My Son stars Cranston Johnson (Hap and Leonard), who’ll be seen in two new series on ABC and Netflix this year.

It takes a creative fervor to be constantly producing in spite of overwhelming uncertainty, but it’s paying off. “I like Hip Hop, I like urban characters,” Maurice says. “I grew up in an urban environment so I like to think I write them pretty authentically.” Hollywood agrees. Maurice currently has a major motion picture being shopped around with Outkast’s Big Boi attached.

Meanwhile, his latest movie treatment, about romance in the digital age, is a finalist for Best Screenplay at the South Carolina Underground Film Festival. “I’ve never been to Charleston,” the filmmaker confesses. “It should be fun.” — Billy Ingram

Jessica Mashburn – Singer, Songwriter

The next time you see her, you might be forgiven if you fail to recognize Jessica Mashburn, the gifted chanteuse whose physical appearance seems to change like the weather. Long a favorite among patrons of Proximity Hotel’s Print Works Bistro, which hosts the popular Wednesday night jazz gigs, the 36-year-old Mashburn performs with partner Evan Olson, not to mention countless events ranging from private parties to splashy weddings. The colorful and chameleon-like songwriter-songstress might be the closest thing in the Triad to a musical theater Renaissance woman. One minute she’s a sultry Berlin cabaret singer from the 1930s, the next a blonde bombshell à la Some like it Hot.

“I love to adapt to whatever is needed the more dramatic the better,” she says. “If someone needs a flapper from the ’20s to greet people and sing them through the door, hey, I’m just the person.” That’s because she sees herself primarily as an entertainer: “My job is to leave folks happy and maybe even inspired.”

Born the daughter of bluegrass musicians from Southern Pines who relocated to Greensboro in 1984 to give their precious daughter “a better exposure to the arts,” Jessica thrived in theater and music at Southeast Guilford before enrolling at UNCG to study music. The large classes prompted her to switch to her hometown, Sandhills Community College, where she sang with the jazz band, taught herself piano and guitar, and earned a degree in music before moving for a brief time to Raleigh to work for Quaintance-Weaver’s Lucky 32 Restaurant, having been a server at the Green Valley Grill during her time at UNCG. 

The divine Miss Mashburn’s versatile talents led to a post at the O.Henry Hotel as events manager in 2005, a job she performed until 2007 (singing on weekends with pianist Dave Fox), when Dennis Quaintance recruited her for the design team of the sister Proximity Hotel. In 2011, this musical polymath who makes her own outrageous hats, “demoted” herself back to server in order to free up weekends for performing — and never looked back. Though she still works as the hotel’s music coordinator, her career has soared like a bird.

“Funny you should say that,” she quipped on a recent afternoon wearing a hairdo done to look like a maple tree in autumn splendor. “My favorite song with Dave is ‘Feed the Birds’ from Mary Poppins. That was Walt Disney’s favorite song. I love to sing it because Greensboro is such a special place and feeds me in a spiritual way.” She went on to say that the Gate City is “a place where artists are welcomed and encouraged. I feel so lucky to be here.”

So do we, dear Jessica. — Jim Dodson

Savio Nazareth – Head Professional, Starmont Forest Country Club

Savio Nazareth was 7 when he first played golf in his native Tanzania. “I hated golf. I was much more into soccer as a kid,” he says with a laugh. “Funny how golf took me to places I could never have imagined.”

It was indeed a long and winding road to venerable Starmount Forest Country Club, where Savio, 39, is completing his first year as club’s eighth head professional in 2018.

His story is one of an East Indian family and great faith — plus times that are a’ changing. In his teens, Savio began winning golf tournaments in Africa and started to think seriously that golf might be his ticket out of Tanzania. His parents arranged for him to attend school and live with his older brother Andrew in Orlando, Florida, where he found a spot on the school golf team. After a stint at junior college, he was recruited by Guilford College’s late beloved coach Jack Jensen, who found scholarship money, guided him through some tough academic transitions and helped him land a sports internship at Southeast Guilford High. “Jack got me through some difficult times. He was more than a mentor to me,” Savio says with emotion. “He was like a father figure.” In 2002, Savio helped guide Guilford College to the National Collegiate championship.

After college he played two years on the Hooters Tour and enjoyed some success, but was soon married and looking for something more stable than the vagabond life of a touring pro. In the spring of 2005, he found a gig as assistant to Starmount Forest’s head man Eric Gaskell, a post he held for the next decade. Popular with the club’s golfing members, Savio qualified for his first Wyndham Championship in 2008 and started seriously thinking about earning his class-A PGA credentials.

The critical moment came in 2016 when he lost his mother, Sabina, and brother Andrew, just five months apart  — and almost his desire to play golf. “I spoke to my mother almost every day, and I owed my brother so much for his support. Losing them was devastating. I felt lost.”

The one thing that kept him going, he says, was wife, Lisa, and their two children, Hillary and Trent, along with guidance from his minister at Shady Grove Wesleyan Church in Colfax. “They helped me see that everything has a purpose and you simply have to keep going and keep the faith that you’re on the right path.”

That faith was redeemed at the PGA Sectional Championship in Wilmington when Savio — thinking of his late brother — rolled in a 4-foot putt to claim the title and went on to win Sectional Player of the Year Honors, earning his exemptions in several major professional tournaments. “I cried like a baby,” he allows.

Maybe the biggest prize came last year, however, when Starmount Forest’s head man Bill Hall retired and Savio Nazareth was rewarded with the top job.

“It’s 13 years and been an amazing journey here, and I’m still learning more every day. This place is really a big family to me. The club has enjoyed a great revival of young families and I’m just honored to be part of that new phase of life.” — Jim Dodson

Jessika & Veronika Olsen – Owners, Sonder Mind & Body

Flotation Therapy, something Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen practice, offers the extraordinary opportunity to experience weightlessness without entering outer space, thanks to 1,000 pounds of epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) added to a pod containing warm H2O. (The pod contains the same amount of magnesium sulfate as the Dead Sea.) My friend Stephanie Bolton, who calls herself a floater, finds that it takes you to inner space.

But to get there you’ll have to venture to Sonder Mind and Body on South Elm Street. The wellness center offers flotation along with infrared sauna, massage, hypnosis, yoga and an organic café.

Identical twins Jessika and Veronika Olsen, 33, believe their health spa and café is one of only two nationwide (the other opening in hipster capital, Austin, Texas). Both sisters battle autoimmune disease. Veronika previously operated a wellness clinic in Hawaii. Jessika owned a bakery business. Since age 19, they have been entrepreneurial with a focus upon wellness. Their mother, a nurse, promoted flotation, having experienced it.

“Flotation is not like anything most have tried,” explains Jessika. “It takes you away from all external things.”

I had to give this a try.

Following infrared sauna, I showered in a private room and with a twinge of trepidation entered the pod after a tutorial from Veronika. Initially I kept the lid open, but as soon as the lights dimmed, I closed it so that I was in a completely dark environment.

If the womb was this exhilarating, how did Mother Nature coax me out? Sixty minutes passed in luxurious slow-mo. My skin felt silken, limbs wondrously weightless, and I was suspended in honeyed, liquid quiet. 

Floating reduces anxiety in veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress, and gives others relief from pain. It offered me meditative calm; utterly, peacefully transporting.

“We don’t want anyone to stress about relaxing,” smiles Jessika.

The original Olsen twins are Greensboro’s newfound treasure. And I’m now a floater, too. — Cynthia Adams

Sonder Mind and Body, 515 S. Elm St., (336) 663-7562 www.SonderMindandBody.com

Joe Rotondi – Executive Director, Forge Greensboro

Once upon a time, Joe Rotondi’s great ambition in life was to work as a bartender all across America, meeting the locals. “Bartending is a great way to take the pulse of a community and really learn what’s going on,” says the friendly 33-year-old. It was his love of people that led him to volunteerism and community development for nonprofits — and eventually studies in social entrepreneurship at UNCG, where he’ll pick up a degree this spring.

Several years back, Joe’s interest in making a bench for City Market led him to Forge Greensboro, an innovative makerspace. At the time it was just off West Lewis Street in a former turn-of-the-century blacksmith shop — hence the name — in a once forgotten part of downtown. What he found there spoke powerfully to his inner community developer — a shared place. There, budding inventors, artisans, trade professionals, tinkerers, entrepreneurs or simple hobbyists could create, learn, collaborate and produce just about anything they could imagine for a simple monthly fee that provides access to proper workspace, advanced tools, and the collective wisdom of a hands-on creative community. 

Joe Rotondi came aboard as facility manager in late 2014 not long before robust membership growth prompted a move to a building on Lewis Street that once served as an auxiliary livery stable and more than doubled the Forge’s usable space, becoming an anchor of the area’s spectacular transformation. Now as executive director, he oversees a grass-roots powerhouse that boasts 195 members and has launched at least 30 different businesses in just five years of existence. On any given day, at any hour, you’re likely to find an inventor of an electric car hard at work on a high-tech 3-D laser machine or a class underway in the brilliantly equipped woodshop. Since opening, the Forge has taught more than 700 diverse classes and skills to nearly 2,000 students of all ages and backgrounds.

“The real beauty of this place is its diversity and the people,” says Joe, who points out that a recently completed capital campaign raised $200,000, funds that will go in part for teaching grants and more advanced equipment for budding engineers, welders, furniture makers, or, who knows, maybe the next Elon Musk. “The Forge’s diversity is its strength, a place designed to teach, share and grow a community by hand,” Joe allows as he leads a visitor through the various workspaces where members are making their dreams take shape, followed by his “shop dog” Mira, a friendly cattle dog he saved from an Alabama kill shelter last August.

“She’s found a home here,” Joe reports. “And so have a lot of very talented people.” — Jim Dodson  OH

“In our January issue, we misidentified Starmount Forest Head Professional Savio Nazareth’s lovely wife, Hillary, as his daughter. In addition, he only has one child, a promising young golfer named Trent. We regret this error and seriously deserve a two-stroke penalty.” — The Editors

To D.I.Y. For

Betsy Brodeur applies ingenuity to her Sunset Hills home

By Cynthia Adams   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

Oh-so-desirable Sunset Hills was developed in the mid-1920s, featuring woodsy green swaths and homes with distinct personalities. According to historians, deed restrictions ensured a “quiet, park-like setting,” requiring that houses be built farther than 45 feet from the street.

Homes here are snapped up quickly by eager buyers, often before a “for sale” sign goes up. When Betsy Brodeur and her husband, Lee, heard the house they’d eyed in Sunset Hills was on the market one February day five years ago, Betsy had to do a look-see. When she did, it was a case of instant, physical attraction.

“The hair on my arms stood up when I first saw it,” she says, recalling stopping for an open house. “When I saw the house, I felt love, and healing.”

As a family, the Brodeurs needed more room for their three daughters, something more spacious and soulful. “We had been looking for so long,” Betsy says. “That same night, somebody broke into our garage and stole all of our lawn equipment.” The urge to move grew more urgent after the burglary. 

When the Brodeurs did a subsequent drive-by, the six-bedroom home with style to spare was already sold. 

They were crestfallen, but they discussed paying off their house in Lindley Park and buying a beach house.

Fortunately, they discovered the sale had fallen through from Melissa Greer, the Realtor who is now their neighbor. They moved swiftly and decisively

There was even a downstairs bedroom and bath, rare in a home of its vintage. Here, the Brodeurs could age in place. 

Almost all of the original footprint of the house was left intact with only one major addition on the rear. They just knew — the ways in which the home wasn’t exactly to their liking were just matters of cosmetics. “It was a spiritual, emotional decision,” says Betsy Brodeur as she stands in the Arts and Craft–style game room, the newest portion of the house overlooking an outdoor kitchen and fountain. 

“We should be downsizing at this point in our life,” Betsy says cheerfully, and chortles. But the couple did the opposite of what their friends were doing in anticipation of retirement. The Brodeurs went bigger. They upsized from that “cute little Lindley Park bungalow” to a 4,500-plus square foot home.

“Lee said, ‘I’m buying the house. But any updates are on you.’” Fine, Betsy thought without hesitation. She immediately thought of her clever mother, who had done far more with far less when it came to fixing up houses, and knew she could handle it. The Brodeurs moved in by April 2013.

The 1929 house was gorgeous, yet the interiors were serious, featuring darker jewel tones. 

The Brodeurs preferred the colors of the sand and sea. “I grew up on the coast; my influences are teals and blues.” Betsy says of their tastes, which were lighter, airier and coastal.

What she wanted was to recreate the light-filled vibe she had always loved as a Floridian from Siesta Key near Sarasota. 

Betsy left Florida in 1996 and moved to Charlotte. “My mother died, and that rocked my world. Eventually, she met Lee while at the beach. 

“A girl from Florida meets a guy from North Dakota in Myrtle Beach!” she laughs.

Their golden retriever is named Myrtle to honor where the couple met.

In some ways, their home is another homage to her mother. Betsy began doing what her mother had done repeatedly as a minister’s wife, polishing up drab parsonages. She showed Betsy that ingenuity could transform a space. Time and again, her mother did the impossible with spaces that were anything but beautiful.

“She was artistic. She made things look fantastic, and also made it great for the next couple coming in,” Betsy recalls. “New minister, new minister’s wife, and they go to this crappy house. It became her gift to the next family.”

The lesson stuck. Betsy followed in her mom’s footsteps, becoming the consummate do-it-yourselfer.

She set out with neutralizing things, deleting Mediterranean and French influences. She gave it the feel that she loves — “beachy,” she repeats. But appropriately so. 

“I had a wonderful teacher in my mother,” Betsy reiterates, using one of her mom’s oft-repeated expressions, “tending the hearth.” “I’ve always liked making my homes comfortable,” she adds, “but this one meant even more. I was almost channeling my Mom and didn’t realize it.”

A year into the move, Betsy had officially made best friends with Benjamin Moore. She began painting and switching a more formal interior to a decidedly beachy one, with wood and wicker furniture and accents. She created a tight color palette, using natural finishes, creamy white and even robin’s egg blue. Paint was going to be the biggest ally in making an already gorgeous home the Brodeurs’ own.

She went at the project after-hours even when exhausted from her workday. Lee eventually suggested Betsy might want to retire and “tend the hearth” full time. Four years ago, she did.

“I’ve always worked with nonprofits, most recently with the Women’s Resource Center,” says Betsy. Retirement would mean she could devote herself completely to updating the home. 

Betsy, now retired, grabbed even more gallons of creamy greige, white and blue Benjamin Moore paints, and rolled up her sleeves to finish the job.

Although Betsy insists “we did things on the cheap,” their refreshed home reads casually refined. “Paint mostly,” she insists modestly. “I learned so much about color. I guess you could say I did it myself,” she says with a throaty laugh. 

She particularly wanted the house to be a haven for her three stepdaughters, even though the eldest is now 25 and will soon marry.

She felt the need for the house’s colors to reflect her stepdaughters’ tastes and preferences, too. “Subtly, I can make their spaces comfortable and mirror them,” she says.

The space gained by the move from a smaller home was more comfortable for the entire family.

“With a limited fix-up budget, I had to be even more resourceful,” says Betsy. Out went beautiful red velvet drapes and formality. The house seems to relax into the new owners’ style. 

The kitchen spiff-up was her second major task after painting. Flooring was replaced with new hardwoods and countertops and backsplash were replaced.

She kept with period-specific updates. Betsy stuck with marble for the kitchen counters, a material that could look as if it had been there for 90 years. The Brodeurs retained the Wolfe professional range, and also kept a pantry with ample shelving and wine fridge, but opted to remove the pantry doors to open the space more.

Betsy, who loved all things color-related, would work alongside the painter hired to work on the kitchen’s cosmetic changes. And she loved having done that, giving herself over to whatever work needed to be done, even the tedium of cabinet painting. 

“To redo the kitchen would have cost us a fortune. But I enjoy seeing the brush strokes.”  She learned new skills by supervising the kitchen work.   

“I did the whole house,” Betsy says with no small pride, doing a walk-through of the sunny downstairs living room, sunroom, dining room, kitchen and added playroom with a secret powder room. 

Spacious for its vintage, it has, in addition to the six bedrooms, a seventh upstairs was converted into a laundry room. “It could be seven bedrooms,” says Betsy. There is room for a workout room and a cozy den upstairs, as well. 

The floors were refinished; surfaces were made more neutral.  Furnishings were kept airy and bright.

As with most homes, the heart is the kitchen, where the marble countertops complement the crisp, white subway tile (versus the previous French hand-painted tiles and darker colors). Betsy stops in what they now call the keeping room. Betsy admits she never heard of it, the one space that had perplexed her. 

Here alone did she rely upon the advice of a pro, Greensboro designer Maria Adams, regarding one thorny problem at the kitchen entry.

“I never had gotten used to the area, with its beams,” says Betsy.  It was walled off and awkward. “We never used it. My husband started saying, should we discuss creating an open floor plan?  Should we move?”

They didn’t want to take down any walls. How to make it work, she wondered?

“Lee bought me an hour’s consultation with Maria, and the designer suggested it be switched out from kitchen eating area to keeping room,” says Betsy. In the meantime, Adams admired how Betsy had taken an already lovely house and made it even more so. 

“She walked in and said, ‘You don’t need me, this is beautiful.’”

Betsy had noticed the designer’s style and was a fan. “I’d seen Maria’s work, I liked her style.  I told her we weren’t using the space correctly. It felt very uncomfortable.” 

But when the designer explained it should be a keeping room, a throwback to colonial days when families would sleep in a room adjacent to the hearth for warmth.

“She said it very well could have been built for that purpose.” The designer sent pictures of suggestions and furnishings. Adams recommended a small sofa and chairs to create a sitting area.

At first, Betsy balked at the designer’s notion, but once the concept of a keeping room took shape, she discovered it was a successful and creative idea. It also honored the house’s history.

Betsy dislikes when history is stripped away. She didn’t want the original beauty of the house to be lost or compromised, which can happen with big-budget remodels.

“When I was in such a hurry, I had to redo things. I couldn’t really rest if the paint color wasn’t quite right,” she recalls. “When you live with it long enough, it will tell you what is needed. It reaffirms I didn’t hire out all the things I wanted to do, “she says.

Today the imprint of Betsy’s coastal theme is complete. 

The sea is imprinted here, too; starfish motifs abound. Betsy admires the starfish because it can regenerate its legs and keep on going.

“I felt the house going ‘thank you,’” she says, relaxed in a wicker chair by the living room fireplace. “I called my husband and said thank you, because I felt the house saying it to me.”

Nonetheless, there is always a project calling to the do-it-yourselfer. She says a 2008 remodel to the upstairs master suite is perfectly serviceable, yet . . . she hopes to eventually make it completely her own. It is spacious and pleasant, “but I’ve had five different paint colors trying to make it work,” she says. “But I have to wait until we win the lottery.”  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Lightcatcher

For landscape painter John Beerman, beauty is everywhere

By Nancy Oakley

A sweeping lawn on a sunny day glistens in shades of greens and yellows, then blues and grays where trees have cast their shadows. You can fairly catch the scent of freshly cut grass, feel a faint breeze skip across your brow. Just as you might absently mop your brow from the scorching heat of a late summer day, while gazing at a dry and dusty country road that curves endlessly toward the unknown. Never mind that the scenes before you are of North Carolina and Texas, respectively. Or that you might never have visited either one of them. “It doesn’t have to be the actual place,” says John Beerman, painter of the two landscapes. He smiles, recalling traveling down a similar dirt road in the flatbed of a pickup truck, with his paints and easel in hand. “It’s not so much about the image as how it’s put together,” he says. And, of course, how the image makes the viewer feel. At some point, we’ve all experienced the elation of being alive on a sunny summer day, or weariness from its oppressive heat.

Eliciting such emotional responses hinges on the play of light in nature, a fascination for the artist and Greensboro native, who stands before the canvas of the summery lawn in his Hillsborough home that he shares with poet Tori Reynolds. “When you look at grass, it has all these things going on. At first you think it’s just a green stripe or a yellow stripe. There’s all this richness.” But capturing that richness in a painting is not about “flash” or a “horn blast,” Beerman insists. “Rich color is not the most brilliant blue you can get out of a tube.” Rather, it’s a matter of, “How do you enrich a gray to make it a full gray? How do you make these subtle nuances glow?”

In another painting of a cottage in New Mexico lit from within at dusk, Beerman has carefully applied several shades of blue, blue-gray, violet and aqua to replicate the building’s corrugated metal roof. He points out the telephone pole and wire in the scene, a feature he once included in a series of paintings of churches. “I’ve had several people come up to me and ask: ‘Why did you mess it up with the telephone wires?’” he laughs. “I just think it’s kind of fascinating the way it curves.” He was similarly taken with, of all things, a Rhode Island trailer park. “The light as it’s falling on the dreary old trailer in a certain way, that speaks to me as much as a beautiful mountainside,” Beerman says. “I’m not really concerned with the ‘beautiful.’ Anything can be beautiful.”

He couldn’t help but be struck by the beauty of the North Carolina mountains during his childhood. It was then that his artistic journey began. His mother had always encouraged art as a pursuit, buying her youngest son chalks and pastels, and enrolling him in private lessons. “I was taking art classes before first and second grade,” he recalls of the sessions with a family friend, Barbara Covington. “She lived on Princess Anne and taught out of the back of her house.” Beerman reels off other memories of the Gate City from those early years: Fisher Park and attending Irving Park elementary school. “I remember the old Lawndale Shopping Center. I’d go to the GI 1200, down from Roses. It was called GI 1200, because it was Government Issue. They had Army knapsacks and such.”

But it was those visits in the early 1960s to his grandparents’ cottage in the mountains that left an indelible impression. In those days, Beerman says the place had no TV, and with few children his own age in the area, he had a lot of time on his hands. He spent it in the company of a distant relation whom Beerman describes as “an amateur kind of a Sunday painter.” The young child was mesmerized. “I’d watch him paint on the deck overlooking this beautiful lake. I think watching him showed me: How do you make use of your time? Nobody wants to sit around. I like to do something. It seemed like a pleasant thing to do. It got me going.” He pauses for a moment, “Plus it was in this beautiful setting . . . maybe that’s what sent me to Vermont.”

The Green Mountain state is a long way from Greensboro, but it beckoned the budding artist as he was starting 10th grade at Page High School. Six weeks into the fall semester, he was working on an assignment in an art class. “At that time it was [called] commercial art,” Beerman remembers. “The first assignment was to go through a stack of magazines and make an ad for GM,” he laughs. But it was an advertisement of a different sort that would transform his life as he dutifully went through the periodicals, choosing one titled New York Times Magazine. “I’d never heard of it, at that point in my life,” says Beerman (ironically, now a loyal subscriber to the Times). “I started to cut stuff up in it, and I noticed in the back, they used to have these little ads for schools,” he continues. One of them, for Woodstock Country School, on a 300-acre farm in Vermont, caught his eye. As did its small size — only 60 people in the student body — and the curriculum. “That little ad said, ‘stresses the arts and humanities,’” Beerman recalls. “And that’s what really stood out to me. I’m not much of a science guy.” The school’s fall term started in early October, so Beerman figured there was still time to enroll; with money set aside from his grandparents, he could cover the cost of tuition.

He was ready to embrace change. His parents had divorced years earlier, his older siblings had all left home for college, and Greensboro in the mid-1970s held little appeal for the 15-year-old. “Downtown was dead; the big thing was Four Seasons Mall; that’s where everybody went. And for whatever reason, I never felt a part of that scene,” Beerman says. “There was not much to keep me around.”

So, he packed his bags and headed north, and for the next three years, he blossomed. “There were kids from all over the place, from out in the country. It was beautiful, Vermont.” Though not particularly outdoorsy, Beerman says he has always loved being outside. “I felt solace in nature,” he reflects. “It’s ever-changing, it kind of feeds my soul  . . . and I love light.” Particularly how it changes. He had ready inspiration in his rural surroundings, where he continued drawing and became involved with photography. So much so, that when it came time to apply to art school  — in Beerman’s case, the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) — he submitted a portfolio in photography and film.

But once again, his trajectory took a detour. “My first figure drawing class at RISD was just charcoal and newsprint. I loved the immediacy of it. I loved — I guess it was the hand quality,” Beerman says. In addition to requiring long, solitary hours in a darkroom, photography, he emphasizes, was “not a hand-to-hand tactile thing, and I loved the tactile thing.”

Beerman quickly changed his major to painting, which provided him with the opportunity of “actually building something. You’re making something with your hands, and I like that. I liked it a lot. Still, to this day, I try all these different papers and linens and supports,” he says. In another landscape, featured in a recent exhibit at Anne Neilson Fine Art in Charlotte, olive and cypress trees on a Tuscan hillside glow in tones of green, yellow and silver, and appear to sway. “This is an egg tempera painting,” Beerman explains, adding that the simple mixture of egg yolk and pigment produces a translucent effect. “It adds a complexity to the color,” he says — as opposed to some of his oil paintings that create what he calls a “mushy” effect.

Beerman discovered egg tempera during his training at RISD. “Craft,” he says, “was really important to me.” At a time when Abstract Expressionism was de rigueur, he felt he had to explore other avenues to inform his painting. “I had to go into the illustration department and take egg tempera classes,” he recalls, “because in painting it’s really frowned on; craft was academic.”

He likes the medium because it dries quickly once it’s applied to a surface primed with gesso [pronounced “Jess-OH”] that he makes himself, with rabbit skin glue and calcium carbonate. “Same thing they used back in the old days before oils came in,” Beerman says of the Italian Renaissance painters. And indeed, another of his Tuscan landscapes is reminiscent of the stylized backgrounds one might see in Piero della Francesca painting. Or perhaps 17th-century French master Nicolas Poussin. “I’ve been all over the place,” Beerman allows. “I had evolved through influences, from Modern to Ancient, and somehow it filtered through me. It’s kind of a mystery because you don’t know it till you see it.”

He saw it clearly in the East Hampton Library while he was living in an artists’ enclave of Springs, on the south fork of New York’s Long Island, following his tenure at RISD and Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. “I discovered the Luminist School, which I’d never known about, had a lot of influence on me.”

Considered among art historians an offshoot of the Hudson River School, the Luminists came later, in the mid-19th century, directing their attention to the effects of light on landscapes. Unlike the Impressionists, who followed a similar quest with diffuse brushstrokes, the Luminists tended toward more precise renderings, their works more muted and reflective. Or as Beerman observes, “The Hudson River School was more dramatic — drama with a big ‘D’ — whereas the Luminists were not melodramatic.” Their subdued paintings, particularly those of Fitz Hugh Lane and John F. Kensett resonated with him. “That’s when I really got married to the landscape,” he says.

Borrowing his father’s VW camper, he retraced Fitz Hugh Lane’s travels through Maine and produced works for his first show in Manhattan — at a time when landscape painting was not in vogue among the intelligentsia. “It was not considered cutting-edge,” Beerman acknowledges. “I don’t like it when art becomes like an echo chamber of a very small group of people. I don’t want art cut off from most people.”

Just as he forged his own path in his youth, leaving Greensboro for Vermont, or exploring those illustration techniques at RISD, Beerman made his singular mark on the art world, his works ultimately finding places in the permanent collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

Based in Nyack in the Empire State’s Hudson River Valley, he relished being only 30 minutes from Gotham’s museums. “Frederic Church did oil sketches when he was traveling. I got to go to Cooper-Hewitt and pick them up — put white gloves on my hand and look at these paintings,” Beerman remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was great!” He maintained close ties with his professors at RISD, where he also taught, and painted his environs, such as a large horizontal of the Hudson River, its imposing cliffs rendered in shades of violet and dwarfing the town of Yonkers in the distance. “Yonkers is an industrial town, factories and all that stuff,” Beerman explains. “And right across are the Palisades — basically the same thing Henry Hudson saw 400 years ago, which is really cool.”

The painting hangs in the hallway of Beerman’s home in Hillsborough. He had heard about the small burg after returning to North Carolina in 2009 when his marriage ended and rented a place there. It was a challenging period, but Beerman reconnected with his roots. His brother Bob, who with his wife, Teresa had established the Bass Violin Shop near downtown, and as Beerman concedes, “The silver lining was, my father was in Well-Spring [retirement community] and dying, and I got to spend the last three months with him.”

There have been other silver linings, as well. After his 40-odd-year absence, North Carolina proved a revelation to the artist. “It’s a wonderful place!” he says enthusiastically. In the 10 years since his return, he’s rediscovered his old hometown, serving on the board at GreenHill for a time, and getting to know a revived downtown with new places, such as Scuppernong Books, which has become a favorite, along with the Greensboro History Museum and, as one would expect, Weatherspoon. Most important: “We’re surrounded by this beautiful landscape.”

A landscape that has been a prolific muse. A frequent subject is Chatwood, the Hillsborough estate of friend and writer Frances Mayes, and where Beerman painted that large expanse of grass in summer. (Mayes also lent him the use of her property in Cortona, Italy, where he painted the Tuscan landscapes.) Beerman likes to revisit the same locations on Chatwood’s grounds season after season: the barn in summer, snow-covered in winter; a pasture bristling with greens in one panel or in somber gray and brown hues of a November day in another. He’ll often make oil sketches, or notes or drawings in a sketchbook and then refine them in the larger paintings in his studio, sometimes working on multiple paintings at different times throughout a given year. Until such time as a proper studio is completed in his house, he uses his garage, where among several neatly labeled crates full of paints, brushes, rags and other materials, he produces a small sketchbook. Its pages contain blocks of color and drawings of trees, studies for a larger painting, commissioned by Rex Hospital in Raleigh.

The artist has also conducted painting workshops at Chatwood, and in other locations around Hillsborough, as one former student recalls. Greensboro painter and interior designer Bill Crowder says he learned to “look at things and see things better” under Beerman’s tutelage. “How blue wasn’t just blue, but many colors,” Crowder explains. “The main thing I learned: How things aren’t what they seem necessarily, and seeing what we don’t perceive as being there.” Beerman uses the example of the tufted titmouse to make the same point. “It’s the most gorgeous bird. It’s just subtle grays, that’s all it is. Most beautiful color ever. But you’d be hard-pressed to say, ‘What color is it?’ That’s what’s so fascinating to me about color.”

He’s constantly experimented with color in a number of projects since his return home: still lifes of Jugtown pottery, the shadows of a clapboard yellow house next to his old studio in downtown Durham, studies of Reynolds, one of the few figure paintings he’s done. The two have collaborated on a poetry project, a volume of broadside verse, one of which Beerman illustrated with a brilliant red Tuscan poppy that seems suspended in time. Another depicts a shaded garden where, in a touch of whimsy, a black cat is stretched out on a patch of grass. “My dealer in New York said, ‘Love the painting, but can’t do the cat.’ That’s the problem with New York,” Beerman says, shaking his head. “Why do you have these rules and stuff? Cats are like, soft and cuddly and not cutting-edge, I guess. But, no way I’m getting rid of that cat!”

And, of course, Beerman revisited the place where it all began, the mountains. There, for an entire month, he created “a whole mess of paintings from one spot” — the porch of a house that a collector had made available to him. The experience proved challenging. “I’d get it just right, go away. And then that moment would not just come back the next day, or the next day. That’s the trick, as a landscape painter: It’s never the same twice, and how do you work on a painting for a long time and somehow keep focus for that moment you originally set out to do?” Beerman posits. One solution is to go the mythic route, as in Mountain, New Moon, a standout in the recent exhibit at Charlotte’s Anne Neilson gallery. In it, an oversized orb dominates a shadowy peak of the Blue Ridge. “I sometimes fool with nature,” says Beerman. “The moon was not that big, but I felt I should go ahead and make it that big. It’s not always literal.”

It’s a testament to a master in full command of his art, this North Carolina native son with the light of his native sun — and moon — at his fingertips . . . that shines from within.  OH

Nancy Oakley is the former senior editor of O.Henry.