Photography by Richard Nichols
Bobbie Hamilton began her painting career as did most of the Masters—as an apprentice. Actually, she was a young mother going to school to study commercial sign painting when she took a job on the side painting ceramics. While sitting at her kitchen table with her 2-year-old son crawling underfoot, she began painting the accessories: feathery fir trees, lampposts, picket fences, affable snowmen and cardinals by the dozen.
Fifteen years later, Mrs. Hamilton still paints every piece by hand at the same table, only now those ceramic accessories are poured and pulled from their molds by her daughter, while a soundtrack of metal guitar wafts through the kitchen from her teenage son’s room.
She wouldn’t have it any other way, painting the mansions and toyshops that are her cottage industry—handmade mini manses known as the First and the Best Lighted Christmas Houses.
The collection that she helped paint as a young mother has existed since 1974. The original molds and specialized techniques were passed down to her and a partner in May 2002.
The series is one of vintage and Victorian vignettes: carolers in fur-trimmed jackets and children pulling each other across frozen ponds. But typical garish coffee table décor it is not: Gone are clichéd reds and greens, excess glaze drips and obvious made-in-Taiwan brushstrokes. Instead, freehand paintings grace interior walls of mansions, cushions inside the picture windows are tufted, and two ornate terra-cotta lavabos line the walkway into a musical greenhouse.
Designed to be as architecturally proportionate as possible, each building and accessory begins as wet clay slip poured into one of more than 5,000 original molds. She signs and numbers each piece before she starts painting. Mrs. Hamilton says no one has collected every piece, although some ceramics collectors want a lamppost and mailbox for every building. Others buy individual pieces customized as gifts. “Santa’s Toy Shop” becomes “Natalie’s Toy Shop,” or a gift-giver will ask for a newly married couple’s surname to be painted above the door of a cozy cottage.
When asked to what degree she is willing to customize, Mrs. Hamilton shudders at the idea of eco-domes or Coral Court Motel replicas, and she slips into tortured-artist mode to describe a custom order of 250 ornaments replicating a local church.
“But I have had clients who come to me to re-create, as much as possible, their vacation homes or family estates.”
Her studio is in her home. The company has no website and doesn’t advertise. Apparently it doesn’t matter, considering that she already has prepaid orders that will keep her busy through March. “It’s almost like a secret society sometimes,” she says, describing the return customers to whom she mails handwritten invitations on vintage paper. “They come from all over for this series, and I have not yet had to travel too far out of St. Louis to sell nationwide.” She will also sell ready-made pieces and take new orders at the Ladue Chapel Holiday Mart.
Looking around the table full of completed houses, she adds, “Thank God I just got a van!”
For appointments, call 314-921-6482 or email Mrs. Hamilton at bjhamilton72@yahoo.com. (Prices range from $35 to $450.)
