House of Joy

After years of living penthouse-style above commercial property she owned off Naples' Third Street South, Naples writer and historian Doris Reynolds is at home at Casa Girasol, house of the sunflower. That flower recurs throughout the mango-colored, stucco residence in Old Naples-on the tiles leading up to the massive pine front door, carved into the door itself, and sprawled across the wall of the pool courtyard in a 25-foot-wide sculpture she commissioned from a team of metal artisans in Mexico.

"They're a tough flower," Reynolds says, explaining her attraction to what she dubs "the orchid of the common people-beautiful to look at and easy to maintain."

Having made her way in the world with her business and writing skills since she was a teen-ager, Reynolds has no patience with prima donnas, be they flowers or people. She moved to Naples in 1952 to work for the chamber of commerce, and in the decades since has been an advertising executive, a magazine publisher, a restaurant owner and an art dealer. Always she's been a writer and traveler, venturing to Haiti, Mexico, France, India and beyond to collect the art and handicrafts now displayed in her home. What ties these sometimes disparate objects together-what makes a black-and-white, hand-woven Kashmiri wool rug at home under a tableau of soft and surreal Haitian paintings-is

the pure pleasure she takes in the talents of those who made them.

"Almost everything in this house has been touched by someone creative," she says. She points out two of her favorite objects in the house-figures of little girls from a family of ceramicists in a village near Toulouse, France. One is feeding chickens, the other carrying bread. "When I look at them, it gives me a good feeling, because they were made with a lot of love and soul," she says.

That connection to the world of the soul resonates throughout Reynolds' home. In her bedroom, an international band of angels above her bed includes a stormy-faced cherub ("a fallen angel," she says) from Brazil. The periwinkle bedroom shutters that the heavenly messengers face (there are no curtains in the home) are cut out with a sun, moon and stars pattern often found in the Islamic world. An insouciant monkey is the main star of a Noah's Ark mural, by local artist Jody Allen, in the outer courtyard; and the home's many homages to the Garden of Eden include the dining room's stained-glass vignette of Adam and Eve being tempted by the serpent. Commissioned in Germany, it's a reproduction of a Haitian painting Reynolds once sold at her Gazebo Gallery, which she owned during the 1970s.

Although she had been interested in both art and travel since childhood ("No matter how little money I had, I always bought art," she says), Reynolds says she had fairly conventional tastes until a press junket to Haiti in 1972.

Haitian art-with its mix of the knowing and the naïve-captivated her instantly. She spent the rest of that week sneaking off to flea markets and galleries, returning to Naples with 18 paintings and plans to open what was then one of just a few Haitian art galleries in the country.

"It was the Golden Age of Haitian art," Reynolds says of the mid-to-late '70s. The oppressive Baby Doc regime was out, and drugs, AIDS and environmental crimes hadn't yet ravaged the country. Television, which she believes altered Haitian artists' perspectives, wasn't generally available. During those years, she amassed works by Haiti's best-known artists-Odin, Duffaut, Charlemagne-as well as little-known ones. Until the 1980s, she went three or four times a year.

Her buying trips to Haiti and elsewhere often involved logistical challenges-she remembers a time in Mexico when her driver had to swim for help after the truck she had rented got stuck fording a river-but she never felt any sense of danger. She bought what she wanted, no matter how big, with no thought of how she was going to get it back. Somehow, she always did.

Like all true collectors, Reynolds believes you'll never regret a piece you bought as much as you will the one that got away. "Indecision is ruinous," she says.

Those same instincts led her to Casa Girasol. "I feel this house was waiting for me," Reynolds says. When she put her last home up for sale, she spent one discouraging day house-shopping in Old Naples, where everything, worth it or not, was at least $1 million. At the end of the day, she looked down the street from one unpromising house to see a cul-de-sac property, surrounded by lush vegetation, with a For Sale sign that had just been put up. Beyond the courtyard and pebble drive, she found an unassuming, old-fashioned Florida house and bought it that day. She renovated it before moving in, making a place for every loved object. Although the same objects were displayed in her last home, that place, she says, had a sense of urban sophistication; the feeling here is fun.

"If you don't smile when you come in, you're a grouchy person," Reynolds says of one of her favorite spots in the house, a grass-green sitting room that holds such treasures as some of her favorite Haitian paintings, a bright collection of Oaxacan trickster animals, hand-carved Hindi gods and a folding wooden temple, and masks and papier-mâché sculptures from Mexico and Haiti.

Every spot in the home is livable. In the living room, a collection of antique blue-and-white china complements a hand-carved fireplace mantle she rescued from a trash bin outside a workshop in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico. (She went back and asked the workman to make her pine front door, carved with the sunflower pattern, rabbits, diamonds and angels.) In the courtyard, her sunflower sculpture shares the light with a real garden designed and tended by botanist George Sands.

Reynolds, who writes a weekly food column for the Naples Daily News, may be most at home in her kitchen, where spices cluster on open yellow shelves and drawers are painted an apple green. The room speaks of her travels-copper pots from Portugal and wall hangings from Haiti-but it also shelters artifacts that remind her of the Naples she knew years ago.

Blue-and-white jars marked for barley, flour and hominy were given to her by her late friend Jane Tibbet, wife of opera singer Laurence Tibbet and a character in several of the stories Reynolds tells in her book, When Peacocks Were Roasted and Mullet Was Fried. Another centerpiece of one of those stories-the Bay View Inn near the Naples City Dock-is recalled by the wooden letterbox she rescued when it was torn down. She uses it as a wine rack, bottles nestling above the room numbers.

"I wouldn't take any amount of money for it," she says.

The same is true for almost all the things in Reynolds' home. "Instead of a big fancy car or a big fancy house," she says, "I want to live with things that other people have done with their talents."