Photography by Susan Jackson
Unless you explored—as Lisa does, every time she leaves home—you’d never know this house spanned so many continents. One of West County’s original farmhouses, its architecture celebrates orderly American virtues, and its more public rooms soothe guests with the expected beauty of family heirlooms and old-world antiques. Then you move into what Lisa (she asked that her last name not be used) calls her Jungle Room, and your eyes fix on the scabbard that hangs over the stone fireplace, decorated by bones from a boar—curved, elegant and only slightly menacing. “I bought it right off of the gentleman who was wearing it, on Nias Island in Indonesia,” she recalls, fingering the carved handle of the sword.
She bought this house 14 years ago, and the first thing she did was open it to the outside, adding a window to the expanded entry to throw outdoor light into the dim hallway, installing French doors in the dining room that opened onto the terrace and adding to the back of the house so she had the perfect party space. Her kitchen, now big, square and friendly, overlooks a pool shaped like a Moorish window. Stone lions guard the curve at the far end, angled proudly, their gazes crossing. “I hate looking at a dead pool,” Lisa says, “so I always open it really early and keep it open as long as possible.” The retro touch, amid all the exoticism? A poolside lunch counter with a pass-through window from the kitchen of the party-ready “Bali Bar” on the lower level.
The patio door to the Bali Bar is framed by two wooden standing monkeys, one wearing Lisa’s specs. “All of this is from the Sepik River region of Papua, New Guinea,” she says, her sweeping gesture taking in the tiny carved people hanging onto the top of the love seat, the carved canoe prow on the wall, the rattan sconces with monkeys holding flame light bulbs in their outstretched paws. She delights in the carved wood oceanic figure, “the hooker of the tribe,” hanging over the bathroom door, her legs gaily open in invitation.
Even Lisa’s work is about play: She’s a travel agent. And what she learns shows up where she lives. She likes walking through her new South Seas outdoor room and getting flooded by sense memories: the rollicking, musical laughter on the islands; the clashing symphony of a Turkish bazaar (“Some people can’t take it in; it’s frightening to them”); the blaze and pulse of Maori tribal ceremonies.
“I’m not fussy,” she says, shrugging off the Fortuny lamps and Italianate mirrored sconces indoors. “I grew up with fine antiques and china—that’s called the living room and dining room. I’m more exotic.”
She furnished the outdoor room with a bistro table and chairs, a couch that allows sprawling, a backgammon table. Under the pergola roof, the geometric design is painted in slate blue and ginger. The pattern on the frosted glass door that leads to the garage is faintly Egyptian.
To amuse the eye, she hung Maori art on the wall and added, as the unquestionable focal point, a carved Maori ancestor pole. “A friend gave it to me! He had it shipped back from Papua, New Guinea. He always said, ‘What will I do if I ever move?’ and I said I’d buy it. So he moved, and the day before he left, he gave it to me as a present.”
Lisa practically lives out here; the atmosphere’s entirely relaxed, and there’s something everywhere to captivate her attention. What she loves most about traveling the world and bringing bits of it home? “Everything is different. The colors are different, the people are different. It’s the silly little things, and the fun—that’s the whole point.
“I have happy art,” she adds. “I don’t have any mean art.” A sudden realization crosses her face. “Er … except one piece.”
She moves back through the house, past the elephant chairs in the window, the multiheaded statue from Lagos and the Egyptian jackal who snuck in, as jackals will. “That’s a BaLuba mask; it’s used in chieftaincy ceremonies,” she says, pointing. “Those are akua’mma dolls from the Ashanti; they represent the ideal of beauty.” She tousles the raffia tassel of the wood Bakuba headdress she bought in Capetown, South Africa. And then she stops. There it is: the one mean thing in the house. A nail fetish sits near the window, the male figure’s body and raised right arm spiked with nail after nail in hopes of winning an audience with the supernatural.
The fetish pries your mind open, and you can’t help thinking about all the lives that have touched all these objects.
Then you go back out in the sunshine, relieved and ready to savor a life that reaches all over the world for inspiration.
