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Oct152009

At Home With Sigrid Olsen - New York Times

DateThursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:45AM


At Home With Sigrid Olsen
From the Fast Lane to the Bike Lane

By SARA RIMER
Published: October 14, 2009

GLOUCESTER, Mass.


Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesSigrid Olsen, an artist, has traded a spacious suburban home for a Gloucester, Mass.,

bungalow that doubles as a gallery.


A CUSTOMER walked up the bright blue steps into Sigrid Olsen’s gallery. Admiring the watercolors for sale in the first room, she wandered into the second, larger room, where more of Ms. Olsen’s fanciful, Caribbean-inspired paintings hang on one wall, above a low teak cabinet.


And there was Sigrid Olsen, the artist and fashion designer — well, she was a designer, until the Liz Claiborne empire eliminated her line, and her job, in January 2008 — calling out a friendly hello. Standing at a wooden counter, with a row of baskets of paints and brushes next to a bowl of fresh fruit, she was fixing a salad.


“Is this a cooking school?” the woman asked.


Actually, Ms. Olsen explained, she was just taking a break from work, and making herself some lunch. Smiling, she encouraged the woman to look around as long as she wanted.


Talk about working at home. Ms. Olsen is living in her gallery here at the Rocky Neck art colony in Gloucester with her husband, Curtis Sanders. Her new gallery and home are merged in the small but airy color-splashed, renovated bungalow that used to be their summer place and is now their year-round residence, and the incubator for Ms. Olsen’s post-Liz Claiborne reinvention of herself as an artist and entrepreneur.


“I get up around 6 or 7 and get right to work,” she said, talking on a recent overcast afternoon at her dining room table that doubles as a work space, and faces a wall of windows overlooking the street, the harbor full of fishing boats, and the jumble of galleries, shops and restaurants. “The sun comes up right there, on the cove. And then in the evening, you see the reflection of the light on all the houses. It changes all day long.”


After she lost her job, and her business, she decided it was time for radical change. At 54, she moved into the summer bungalow and began painting ceramics, cards and watercolors, returning to being the artist she was in her 20s, when she was living in a $60-a-month, 600-square-foot cabin with no indoor plumbing in Rockport, Mass. Living in her studio, and working in her home, got Ms. Olsen and Mr. Sanders thinking about selling their 3,600-square-foot house, in Hamilton, Mass., a 20-minute drive away. All that space and luxury — two decks for entertaining, four bedrooms, a separate apartment for visitors — no longer made sense. The taxes alone were about $12,000 a year. Then there was the constant hiring of people to paint the house, mow the lawn, and do repairs.


And Hamilton’s suburban location, closer to Logan Airport, and to Ms. Olsen’s former company office in Beverly, Mass., was no longer a draw.


Mr. Sanders, a former textile salesman who now works with Ms. Olsen, had joined his wife at the table. “No one ever dropped by in Hamilton,” he said.


Now, people drop by all the time: customers, tourists, other artists who are among their neighbors. In Hamilton, they had to drive to everything. In Rocky Neck, Ms. Olsen gets around on her bicycle — or by kayak.


“We loved the house in Hamilton,” she said, “but we had become alienated from it.”


Last November, despite some anxiety over the question of what they would do with all of their possessions, they sold the house in Hamilton, an affluent suburb where the average listing price for a four-bedroom house is $868,000, according to Trulia, the real estate Web site.


“It gives us the freedom to start a new business without having to depend on anyone else,” Ms. Olsen said. “What we’re doing now — all the new things — I’m doing it with my own money.”


Her new ventures include leading yoga and art retreats for women in Italy and running a second, small shop out of rented space in another part of Rocky Neck. She has written a cookbook. She is exploring ideas for another book, a television show and a hotel — in Gloucester, or maybe somewhere else.


The Rocky Neck house consists of about 1,200 square feet of combined living, work and gallery space all on one floor, over the garage. The garage provides additional work space for Ms. Olsen and a studio for her 90-year-old father, Dane van Sand, a painter, who lives nearby.


In preparation for the sale, Ms. Olsen and her husband gave away some of their furniture and other household goods to family members, and to a local charity. Then Mr. Sanders organized four garage sales over a series of several months.


Ms. Olsen did not attend the sales, preferring not to watch people haggling over her things. Like her 50 pairs of size 10 designer shoes. Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Prada. The slightly worn pairs went for $25. A pair of dusty rose silk Yves Saint Laurent stilettos, a gift from Mr. Sanders, but still in the box and never worn, went for $50.


“They were really beautiful,” Ms. Olsen said.


She and her husband grinned at each other across the table.


“They hurt your feet,” he said.


“There was the hurting the feet part,” she said. “I used to buy shoes that you would wear into the taxi, into the restaurant and back home. What’s the point of that?”


“Now I wear ballet slippers all the time,” she said. “You have to walk.”


At the moment, she was wearing no shoes. She doesn’t miss the house, she said, or anything in it, except sometimes, the two-sided fireplace with the granite hearth that was in the family room. It was a great place for people to hang out while she was cooking. And, she said, it was a mistake to sell her art books.


What about her husband? “My CD’s,” he said. “I regret that. That was a mistake.” He had 3,500 of them. Country, blues, jazz, rock. They went to a collector, after he put them on his computer, and iPod. But the iPod is not the same, he said. The music sounded better on the CD’s.


He shrugged. He can live without the CD’s. “I still think we should have less,” he said.


The sign over the porch says Sigrid Olsen Art, not Sigrid Olsen Home, and a lot of customers do a double take when they walk in the door. The first room, with the hand-painted ceramics displayed on a table, is clearly a shop. But then customers turn right, into the much larger, second room, and register the galley kitchen and the dining room that opens into the living room, with the pair of white sofas, and the framed family pictures on the wall.


Sometimes Ms. Olsen, or her part-time gallery manager and Web graphics designer, Erin Arnason, whose desk is across from the kitchen, overhear them trying to figure it out. “They’ll say, ‘Sigrid Olsen can’t live here,’ ” Ms. Olsen said. “Or they’ll say, ‘But where does she live?’ ”


She walked across the room, and opened the door, with the opaque stained glass windows, into the minimally furnished bedroom, with one wall painted hot pink, windows overlooking the small backyard, and its separate bathroom — there is a half bathroom in the gallery — and walk-in closet, with its neatly organized racks of clothing and, in the corner, a tall dresser.


“This is the secret — having everything in the closet,” she said.


Mr. Sanders, who was listening, called out something about what she was leaving out. Ms. Olsen laughed. “There are two secrets,” she said. “The other secret is having Curtis as a husband. He’s a neatnik.”


And, yes, she said, the small space means they’re thrown together more than they were in their old house. “We like it,” she said.


All in all, she said, smaller, and closer — to her husband, and her customers — has turned out to be better.


Now, she said, she feels more grounded, and creatively inspired, than she has in years. Part of that is having customers wandering around. “Sometimes people will come in and I’ll say, ‘I’m thinking of doing this — what do you think of that?’ ” she said.


That, she said, is her kind of market research — market research in her own home. 

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