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Photo Sue Harrison
Jody Melander inside her fanciful garden house. |
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Photo Jody Melander
Melander's miniature house sits at Gaskill's. |
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A room of her own (or his own)
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Who hasn’t dreamed of that perfect little private space? A tree house, playhouse, clubhouse, writing room, hideout — so many secret and wonderful options. Now Jody Melander is offering kids a chance to make that a reality and adults a chance to recapture that lost sense of childhood when a place to dream was all that was needed to make everything possible.
Melander, a woman who could be aptly called a Jill-of-all-trades, has turned her creative eye and hand to making tiny, one-room houses that are full of whimsy and charm. She is having a literal open house for one of her “Poetic Spaces: Backyard Dream Houses” at Gaskill’s Garden Center at 43 Race Point Road in Provincetown from 1 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 1. She says there will be juice for the kids, wine for the adults and mini cupcakes for everyone.
Her background includes tile making, faux painting and sculpture. She has worked on the maintenance of the dune shacks operated by the Peaked Hill Trust and made white-line prints. She’s built wooden dinghies, made puppets for a professional troupe and created sculpture with moveable parts. She caused quite a stir during the celebration of the successful moving of the Highland Light in Truro a few years back when she made a wearable lighthouse crowned with revolving beams that got her photo sent round the country by the Associated Press.
Now her attention is on a more private and personal expression of remembered or imagined spaces.
The houses are individually handcrafted, not prefab garden sheds fluffed up. They are a combination of up-to-date materials, found objects and creative use of existing items for other purposes. The house on display at Gaskill’s has miniature French doors and gingerbread trim leading into a snug interior with a mantle, faux fireplace and battery-operated wall sconces. There is even a doorbell.
Each part of the house was fabricated by hand. She uses MDO plywood which is resin-coated and holds paint better in outdoor situations. She routed out lines to create a beadboard wainscoting inside and barnboard look outside. The windows are mostly salvaged. She strips any pre-used wood products down to bare wood to make sure there is no residual lead paint anywhere in her structures. The roof is made of 1X6 tongue-and-groove planks and covered in cedar shingles.
The houses could be considered yard art, meditation rooms, reading retreats or even a folly in the tradition of old English manors. Regardless of what you call them, they make you smile the second you see them.
This house has a playhouse feel, she says, but other houses might be a more adult space, and she’s even looked toward the harbor.
“It would be fun to build a 12-by-12-foot float and put a little house on it,” she says. “It could be a little art studio or writing studio that people could rent out for a day or a week.”
It would be, she adds, the ultimate escape from the busy-ness of town. Just a short paddle out in a rowboat and there you are in the dream house with the waves slapping the sides of the float.
Melander says she first had the idea for the houses when she saw some old five-foot casement windows being thrown away. “It said French doors to me,” she says. “Then I thought of a little cottage. I have a bunch of nieces and decided to make them a house. It took a year and a half to make. Then I drove it down to Pennsylvania in panels and put it together.”
Then, serendipitously, she took the leftover scrap to a poet friend for her woodstove. Melander wound up telling her where the wood came from and the friend almost immediately wrote a check and said, “You need to build these.”
That was the kick in the pants Melander needed. It was, she said, fate stepping in.
Head out to Gaskill’s on Wednesday and see where fate has taken this multi-talented woman now.
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Jul 26th, 2007