Ida Baisch leans against plump pillows on her new Southern swing bed, smiling up at the blue ceiling of her front porch. And if this were a short story, everything would flow from that sentence. “People here don’t understand,” says Baisch, who grew up in Georgia, “that a front porch is more than a porch.”
It’s the buffer between a busy day and domestic life. “I sit out here and drink my coffee,” she says. “I read out here at the end of the day.” She hoists her 2-year-old son to her lap and says, mock-stern, “This was supposed to be my quiet spot. Yesterday there were two baby goats up here!”
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The house sits atop a hill, so the long, deep front porch made grading a nightmare. “We couldn’t just have a nice back porch?” Justin Baisch asked. “Absolutely not,” his wife replied. The rest of the design took its cues from that porch, and its ceiling had to be painted “haint blue,” which, in the Gullah tradition of Ida Baisch’s native Georgia’s lowlands, keeps spirits from entering the home. “I’m probably not that superstitious,” she says, “but my mother had a blue porch ceiling, and my grandmother had a blue porch ceiling…”
The swing, its mattress encased in burlap, overlooks a manicured vista: swaths of flat velvet green and rich corduroy brown; trees as round as they are in a children’s book; bubbling springs and a creek and a pond; a pasture with horses scattered.
In summer, 35 polo ponies fill the barn, welcomed by the family’s other horses, Charlotte the pig, an old sheep, a donkey, two border collies, a Great Pyrenees, a supposed barn cat that prefers to sip from the powder room commode, and the aforementioned baby goats. The black-and-white one, Blue, comes to the front porch each morning and bleats for the Baisches’ toddler, Campbell, then follows him around devotedly.
Campbell was named for a wizard horse trainer who mentored Ida, back when she was a young horse trainer and met Justin Baisch, a professional polo player. “I was smitten,” she admits. “I kept telling myself, ‘It’s just a guy on a horse.’”
Now Justin plays for fun and co-owns a commercial freight business, and Baisch runs Southern Spring Farm & Polo Club. Every summer, crowds gather to watch matches, and anyone’s welcome.
The Baisches used to live in Wildwood, but they really wanted a field, so Ida started taking the kids to the diners the farmers frequented, asking whether anything was for sale. Finally, she contacted a family that owned farmland in Eureka and asked about the parcel with that nice flat area at the bottom of the hill. They agreed to sell it.
“All of this was hayfields and soybeans,” she says. First, the Baisches built the barn and moved the horses in. Then they started on the field, the polo arena, and the house.
It’s rustic in a polished way, and, in respite from the cheerful chaos of the barnyard, serene. “If you don’t have one ‘style,’ it either goes very badly or it’s very good,” she says, giving designer Emily Castle of Castle Design credit for reading her personality and taste so accurately. Above all, Baisch says, it had to be peaceful: “You want your home to be a sanctuary when the rest of the world is falling apart.”
Baisch, who grew up in an antebellum house, brought pieces from her childhood. “Some things are just going to have to fit in.” An old tack chest doubles as a table; many of the chairs, she painted herself. Friends come over to watch football games on the patio. On quiet evenings, Baisch reads on the porch. She owns every Dick Francis book; a stack is on her desk in the office. Trophies and family pictures and antique metal bits hang on the wall, for which Castle found just the right paint shade: a deep blue-black-green that changes with the light, and warms the room instead of deadening it.
Farm life and the breeding and training of polo ponies aren’t easy work, but Baisch loves it. She grew up this way, and she wants the same life for her kids: a family in which everybody’s caring about the same things, too full of fresh air to get lost in a screen.
And when the girls are riding their ponies, and Justin’s playing one of the horses Baisch foaled and trained, and Blue is trotting after Campbell, and the donkey and the sheep are strolling the grounds…she knows that the work is worth it. No evil spirits can get a toehold.
