A did a post a while back about artist-in-residence Aldwyth's stay with us and show at the gallery. We have stayed close and visited her in South Carolina last year. Aldwyth had shared with us that the owner of one of her seminal pieces, Cigar Box Encylopaedia (yes that is how she spells it), wanted to find a new home for it and Ellen and I excitedly signed on.  The piece consists of 26 collaged cigar boxes, one for each letter of the alphabet and all items in each box begin with that letter. When we were down in South Carolina we had a wonderful "passing of the baton" ceremony from Joe and Carolyn, the previous owners, and a few tears were shed.

Even though the piece did travel on the three city museum tour in 2009-2010, including the Ackland in Chapel Hill, we decided to mount a show here at Cassilhaus Gallery so more folks would get a chance to experience it up close and personal (Aldwyth hated it that people were not allowed to touch the boxes during the museum shows). The original museum show was curated by Mark Sloan, the director and senior curator at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston which was one of the venues on the tour.  Mark commissioned a wonderful video about Aldwyth's work and had high resolution photographs of the tops and bottoms of each of the boxes made to exhibit above the boxes so viewers could see all sides of the pieces.  Mark graciously provided both the video and the photographs for our exhibition.

I had never installed anything like this before.  In the museum shows the boxes were installed on long shelves and I wanted them to be more independent.  After a few false starts with various plastic materials, Ellen suggested we get custom fabricated metal shelves.  I went to Young Roofing in Durham (truly the land that time forgot) and showed them a sketch and they made me brackets out of 24 guage stainless steel scraps and I put picture frame bumpers on them to provide enough friction to hold the boxes in place.

It was our first use of video in an exhibition here.  I found a flat panel TV with a built in DVD player and it worked very well.

Ellen has become the vinyl letter specialist.

I have to say that the exhibition looked fabulous.

We were completely thrilled when Aldwyth agreed to come to the opening in October.  She brought one of her amazing large format (6'x6') collages, Casablanca (colorized version) to exhibit just for the opening.

I have to admit is was my first experience with a non fabric artist ironing their work!

The opening was a smashing success and Aldwyth really made our experience of the work rich with her many anecdotes and stories of making the piece.

Fripp, however, was unmoved.

I reprised my alphabet shortbread cookies to honor the occassion.

Even after living with the piece for 5 months I have not even scratched the surface of all of the amazing details I keep discovering.  The "G" box-

The "K" box.

The "O" box.  That's a real ostrich egg.

The "Z" box

The "S" box is one of my favorites.  Where else do you get Superman on a spoon in a shark's mouth?

The "Q"

A detail from the lid of the "P" box.

and the side of the "A" box.

It is an amazingly rich experience to get to know artists and their work with this level of intimacy.  Thank you Aldwyth for sharing your world.

I am woefully far behind on my posts but I didn't want to leave out our annual Meals from the Market fundraising event for Durham Central Park last fall. Every year, along with our intrepid co-hosts Grace, Mary Jane, Morgan, and Renee, we host a dinner or party to benefit park expansion.  For 2011 we had a sit down dinner for 24 which stretched out to the screened porch.
Ellen and our cousin Jeanne head up the chef team.

It was a New Orleans Jazz Brunch theme.

mahalo Jazz duo Alison Weiner and Doug Largent kept our toes tapping.

Even Fripp dressed for the occassion.

Back in 2008 when we cleared our land we asked our contractor to save all of the red cedar trees on the property for some as yet undetermined future building project.

Of course, nearly 4 years later, we had these huge stacks of cedar logs at the permimeter of our property untouched and providing a virtual Club Med for snakes. In a almost evangelical spurt of motivation we decided to hire a portable saw mill operator and Ellen and I (along with the vastly stronger Julian) moved all of the logs up to our carport in anticipation of his arrival.  Some of the logs were so heavy we had to cut them up to move.

The saw mill guy promptly blew us off (our stack apparently unworthy) and we shared the carport with the logs for another 3 months.  We finally found the fabulous Mike Spanolia from Haw River Timber Mill and he brought his bright shiny and ENORMOUS portable mill to our driveway on a beautiful November day and we had a blast.  We still didn't have a definite idea of exactly what we wanted to make with our cedar--chicken coops, trellises, an entry table, shelves, and cedar salmon boards all were on the wish list so we decided to just mill each log for maximum yield.  Because it is all for us, we could decide to make 3 1/8" x 3 1/8" posts if we liked or 2 x 7 1/4s or whatever.

One of Ellen's student's Ben helped us haul the logs to the mill.  It had all of these cool hydraulic lifts and turners that manipulated the logs and anchored them in place for the traveling blade carriage.  The blade was a 12' long bandsaw and the mill could handle logs up to about 25' long.

The finished product was stunningly beautiful.

We created a pile of pieces that were "too beautiful to cut further" that we hope to use for furniture applications.

We got quite a beautiful stack.

Ellen and I cut up all of the edge remainders for firewood and we collected two huge trash cans full of cedar saw dust.

All in all an incredibly satisfying day.  Cedar salmon planks were a popular gift item this holiday season.  Happy New Year to everyone.

As the poet said, "only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. 

                                         ~Woody Allen

Exciting news from one of our 2011 artists-in-residence, Doug Beube.  After over 6 years of gestation, he has released his career monograph--Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex and launched a comprehensive website showing his fabulous range of work in various media.  Check them both out here!

Around the eyes is a perforation the buyer of the book can remove. The lozenge shape then becomes a bookmark. Cool.

For the 3rd straight year (see post on our first party here) we were asked by the American Dance Festival to host a post performance party for one of the major touring companies in this years festival.  It is something that Ellen and I really look forward to every year and enjoy as much as the amazing dance performances themselves.  We were so honored to be asked to host Shen Wei Dance Arts this year--one of the premiere modern dance companies in the world.  Most recently Shen Wei came to the world's attention by being asked to be the principal choreographer of the opening ceremonies for the Bejing Olympics. As usual Ellen prepared a yummy feast and we had a great opportunity to get to know the company.

Sarah Tondu, ADF czarina, wtih co hosts Jim and Jane Finch.

Ellen and Co-host extraordinaire Ellen Ciompi

Shen Wei

Choreographer Mark Haim, our most recent artist in residence, with friends.

"The dance is the mother of the arts.

Music and poetry exist in time;

painting and architecture in space.

But the dance lives at once in time and space."

- Curt Sachs

In our ongoing efforts to establish collaborations with major arts organizations we contacted our friend Jodee Nimerichter,  the co-director of the American Dance Festival to inquire about hosting our first choreographer in residence.  She enthusiastically recommended Seattle based Mark Haim (rhymes with time) who incredibly would be spending his 18th!! summer in Durham with the ADF.

From student to master instructor he has become a festival institution. Mark was a delight from day one and we discovered we had many friends in common. We had a dinner party one night and dessert was the opening of a piece of art we just purchased from one of our previous artists in residence, Aldwyth, called Cigar Box Encyclopedia (stay tuned for an exhibition sometime this fall.)

(Mark is at far right)

Mark celebrates with fellow ADF instructor Raphael Lopez-Barrantes

Mark gave a fantastic artist talk while he was here (so much so that his scheduled QiGong demonstration never happened) and talked about his dance career and inspirations and spoke in depth about a major work in process that will premier in March 2012 at On the Boards in Seattle that explores two very different approaches to the perception of the passage of time.

After having primarily visual artists in residence it was particularly fascinating to talk with Mark about his process and how much text and image were important in creating his movements.

Mark has a devilish sense of humor.  Not to be missed is his reinterpretation of Beyonce's Single Ladies video performed live at the festival in 2009.

We have a renewed appreciation for the incredible amount of time and effort that go into making a successful piece of choreography.  Thanks for everything Mark. We will really miss having you around here.

Back in 2000 I took a sabbatical from my job and spent 3 months travelling in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. I was pretty serious about photography and shot a bunch of 35mm slide film along the way.  As it turned out the Motel 6 chain was in the process of renovating all of their motels in the West and every night I was staying in a different brand new Motel 6.  I started shooting the interiors and produced a series of photographs that I eventually framed and installed in the men's room at my office in downtown Durham. They had the characteristic sickly green tint of unfiltered fluorescent lights and became a celebrated permanent installation. Fastforward 11 years and I get a notice in the mail about a gallery in Charlotte that has put out an artist call for entry for NC photographers for a show called Eyes of Carolina.  The show was to be juried by the director of the NC Museum of Art Larry Wheeler.  I forwarded the notice to all of my photographer friends and my friend MJ dared me to enter the Motel 6 series. To my shock and delight my work was chosen along with 4 other talented NC photographers for a 3 month show at DOMA Gallery in Charlotte.  If you get to Charlotte check it out. Otherwise, here is the series!

Enjoy.

To celebrate our 25,000th visitor here at the Cassilhaus blog I finally decided to launch the Cassilhaus website. No graphic designers need fear for their jobs but it covers the basics of our residency, exhibition program, and has the requisite photos.  Take a look around and thanks to everyone for continuing to read my posts.

As usual I am a little late with this.  Doug Beube, a Canadian who hails from Brooklyn, was our resident artist back in April and May.

He was here for 7 weeks and boy did we learn alot about "bookarts".  We discovered Doug's work in a book I got Ellen for her birthday.  She is a super map geek and Katharine Harman's The Map as Art is dinner and dessert for a map geek.  It was like finding a whole new world of art. Doug is a mixed media artist and although his MFA is in photography, his prime focus currently is bookarts. Among other things he is the curator of a private collection in New York City entitled, The Allan Chasanoff Bookworks Collection: The Book Under Pressure and his time here at Cassilhaus was spent working on a commission for Mr. Chasanoff.  Doug was the first artist we invited who was a complete unknown to us and there was excitement and a bit of risk in that--fortunately he turned out not be a hamster strangler!

I have given up predicting what will and will not happen during residencies here but I must say zipper dyeing was not even on my radar.

In addition to dyeing the zippers Doug needed to shorten them by painstakingly removing metal teeth.

Doug did a piece for fellow Canadian artist k.d. Lang called The Many Lives of Miss Chatelaine which was one of his first to incorporate zippers as a low tech method of "cutting and pasting" sections of the "book" and allowing quick rearrangement.

When we first talked to Doug about coming to Cassilhaus he said he would need a shop with a dust capture system for his physical manipulation work on books.  We contacted our good friends at the UNC Art Department, Jim Hirschfield (chair) and Jeff Whetstone and they put us in touch with Pat Day at the UNC Art Lab which turned out to be a fabulous resource.  UNC has been a great collaborator for us with our residency.

In this particular project, Doug has placed a plastic "resist" at a certain point within the book and is grinding a large hole through the cover of the book and down into the pages. He will then begin to develop the interior content.  He has a fascinating method of developing a new narrative from the existing text of the book by highlighting certain words using painting and drawing.

Each section can now be moved around to change the narrative.

Doug gave a wonderful artist talk near the end of his stay where he showed works in progress and talked about his photographic, sculpture, and bookarts work.

The main thrust of what we are doing here at Cassilhaus is trying to engage the local arts community with our resident artists.  It was particularly exciting that Doug's talk connected us with a vibrant (and unknown to us) books arts scene in the Triangle and specifically a newly formed books arts group of artists, many of whom were in attendance. We are continually finding new constituencies that bring new energy to Cassilhaus.  Thanks Doug.

Only common things come when common sense prevails.                 --Anonymous

Greetings!  I attended Arts Advocacy Day at the NC Legislature this year for the first time to try and keep our fine legislators from slashing arts funding.  We each got cool Arts Create Jobs buttons which I got a ton of comments on and when I inquired about getting a bumper sticker they said they didn't have them.  Now they do!  I printed these up.  Get yours free by sending a SSAE (#10 business envelope) to me at 6301 Mimosa Drive, Chapel Hill, NC  27514.  Let me know how many you want.  Cheers.  Let's cover the state with these and remind everyone how critical the arts are to our economy and our culture.

We just got the exciting news that Cassilhaus is featured this month in Architectural Record.  Check it out here.

It is hard to believe that we have never had a musical event at Cassilhaus but that has all changed now.  We were contacted by the Mallarmé Chamber Players and asked if we would do a house concert/fundraiser for them and it sounded incredibly cool. Named for 19th Century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé the group is a flexible ensemble of professional musicians based in Durham, North Carolina, whose mission is to enrich the lives of the community through outstanding chamber music.

We were a little bit worried about the acoustics because it is such a live space but fortunately we don't have a lot of parallel walls and the concert sounded fantastic.

We were lucky to have world class catering donated by Chef Theresa Fox and her team at the Art Insitute of Raleigh-Durham Culinary Program Really delicious!

The inestimable Shana Tucker, operations czarina, made everything run like clockwork.  Sorry I made you help me move the couch!

Board chair Beverly Meek gave introductions and shared the Mallarme story.

We had a delightful crowd of about 40.

Violinist Eric Pritchard

Violist Neil Leiter

Our cousin Madeline Sutter, a wonderful landscape architect (and big fan of chamber music) from Oriental NC joined us for the whole weekend and Ellen picked her brain about our garden.

Anne Parks speaks with creative director and violist Suzanne Rousso and French Hornist Rachel Niketopoulos

.

Ellen's friend John Bell.

Violinist Jeremy Preston and KidzNotes Executive Director Katie Wyatt.  Check out this amazing organization!

I must confess that I am not much of a classical music person but I really drank the KoolAid!  I am ready for the next concert.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.   --Laurie Anderson

Occassionally we get requests to use the house for photo shoots and it is a great way to supplement our income.  We had a request from a flooring manufacturer to use the house for two days a few weeks ago and we had a blast. Wonderful crew.  Here are a few snaps.  I don't know if we will ever see the finished product but it is for a national ad campaign.  Thanks so much to Laura, Greg, Kenny, and Rodney!

The bed looked so perfect after Kenny was done with the steamer we were afraid to sleep in it.

6 months of the year we welcome artists into our home as Cassilhaus artists-in-residence.  We started our 2011 season on March 1 with wonderful artist and dear friend Ann Ehringhaus. Ann is an extraordinary artist/photographer, proprietress of Oscar’s House B&B on Ocracoke Island, Reiki Teaching Master, Minister, Healer, and all around amazing human. Both Ellen and I got to know Ann independently by staying at her B&B.  I have know her for probably 25 years.
 
Ann only had two weeks with us and it went by in a blur. She was at Cassilhaus to work on her current book project: Surviving the Fantasy: 13 Insights into (B&B) Happiness, and she shared a reading at the end of her stay. Since one of her main "survival" strategies has been self-care, she led us in exploring together some key acupressure points for body awareness and enhanced health.  Almost everyone in the crowd had stayed with Ann on Ocracoke and it was a moving evening of common experience.  The most frequent comment was that the book had a much more universal audience than the Bed and Breakfast community.  We understand there might be a few more insights added after her stay...Ann it was pure joy to have you here.

Our niece Erin (in blue) was visiting from St. Louis and got to experience some of her crazy Aunt and Uncle's life as well as explore Durham and Chapel Hill.

For in the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

Baba Dioum

George Smart is a force to be reckoned with. Through his website Triangle Modernist Houses he has almost single handedly put moderist architecture on the map in the Triangle area and beyond.  One of George's zillion programs is one called Appetite for Architecture which allows anyone to share a meal with one of the Triangle's best modernist architects.  My lovely wife Ellen, principal of Ellen Cassilly Architect, participated for the second time this year and we held the event here at Cassilhaus.  It was an incredibly diverse group and we had a grand time.  We were joined by Leon Meyers who built the house. As usual Ellen outdid herself with a fabulous meal.

Back in 2000, just after I had started collecting photography, I went to my second ever photo collecting show called Photo LA in Los Angeles.  I was very green and pretty clueless about photography.  I went into one of the booths--the Gomez Gallery (no longer in business) because I was drawn to one of the images on the wall.  The woman in the booth asked me if I wanted to look at "the work".  I said sure and she brought out a big black portfoliio box filled with large black and white nudes shot in water. They were extraordinary and some so abstract that you couldn't tell what body part you were looking at. With each print she told me amazing background and stories and after a while I'm thinking to myself "man this women knows a scary amount about this artists' work" Finally I had to ask--"how is it that you know so much about this artist?"  "I am the artist" she said with a wry smile.  This was my introduction to Baltimore based artist Connie Imboden Connie has been exploring this nexus of light, water, flesh, reflection, and emotion for 30+ years. Much of the work is shot in her own black bottom swimming pool in her back yard.  I bought this extraordinary image, Dead Silences 1 (1988) that day.

After I got it framed I saw in vertically and I was so entranced that I put two picture hanging wires on the back so I could hang it in either orientation. It is completely different image!  I asked Connie about it and she said she does that with several of her images.

Fast forward 11 years.  I get a call from a photographer I know, Barbara Tyroler telling me her friend Connie Imboden was coming to the area to participate in a show at the FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill and give a lecture at Through This Lens Gallery in Durham. She asked if she could bring Connie by to see Cassilhaus and reconnect.  I was thrilled.  We had such a wonderful visit.

(Barbara, me, and Connie)

 Connie's talk was very illuminating and well attended-a fabulous visit all around.

(Roylee Duvall-proprietor of Through this Lens, me, photograher Bill McAllister, Connie, photographer Caroline Vaughan) Photo courtesy of Kay Chernush. Spend some time on Connie's website.  It is a fascinating body of work.

The cure for anything is salt water--sweat, tears, or the sea.                                                                                                                                                                           Isak Dinesen

Ellen and I decided that we want to have one major exhibition a year in the gallery--likely in the fall.  It is a huge amount of work to mount a show so one major show feels about right.  We also have mini shows in tandem with our resident artists and the rest of the year we have our own photo collection on display. Our first Cassilhaus show with MJ Sharp in 2009 was an unqualified success and set a pretty high bar.  When we were brainstorming ideas for the 2010 show Ellen had a great idea.  We are members of the Friends of Photography (FOP) at the NC Museum of Art, a collectors group that helps support photography acquisition at the museum.  We take field trips to see members private collections and she said "so few people get to see these amazing collections--why don't we curate a show from our members' collections and put it up in the gallery?" I was immediately hooked.  I asked Huston Paschal, a former NCMA curator, dear friend, and fellow FOP member if she would put together the show with me and she enthusiastically (and perhaps foolishly) agreed.  We went to visit 10 private collections in the area and were BLOWN AWAY with the quality (and quantity) of work we encountered. We looked at well over 1000 photographs and quickly gleaned that we would have enough top quality work for 4 or 5 shows.  We decided to give our self some constraints to bring the number of pieces to a manageable number.  It was painful but first we eliminated color work and then we eliminated digital prints.  We were left with traditional black and white darkroom prints and even then it was painful to get down to the 74 prints that we ended up including in the show.  The prints were stunning and the list of photographers reads like a list of the medium's masters: Robert Adams, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Lee Friedlander, Andre Kertesz, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Ralph Steiner, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Brett Weston to name just a few of the included artists. We were extremely pleased that regional photographers were so well represented in the collections we drew from including fantastic work by North Carolina's own  Frank Hunter, Elizabeth Matheson, David Simonton, and Jeff Whetstone. The entire checklist from the exhibition is available here. 

Here are a few installation shots.

We had a wonderful opening party in October and I regrettably forgot to take pictures.  I made up for it at the festive Black and White themed closing party!

Our 5 star catering team of Jeanne, Lynn, Renee, and Ellen spoiled us all. Ellen even invented a black and white appetizer.

 

Nice shoes Jefferson!!

Photographer David Simonton, featured in the exhibition, is clearly showing his preference for film.

World class photo tryptic Elizabeth Matheson, David Simonton, and Burk Uzzle.

Look carefully at Jim's shirt buttons!

My co-conspirator on this exhibition Huston Paschal with friends Guy and Mindy

I was terribly sad this week to see all this beautiful work go back to its owners.  I have become quite attached to some of these images.  We are very grateful to all of the generous lenders who made this exhibition possible.  We had over 650 people view the show incuding photo classes from Duke and UNC.  Now we have to start working on next year.......................

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  ~Dorothea Lange

A few weeks ago we had our 20,000th visitor to this blog. Who would of thunk it! Thanks for visiting and everyone have a Happy Holiday!  Below is our candle lit Cassilhaus tree........

I am only about 4 months late with this post. Good thing I’m in charge! Our last artist resident for 2010 was Aldwyth. She is a phenomenal collage and bricolage artist based in Deer Island, SC who came to us by a lucky twist of fate.  We had another wonderful collage artist from Brooklyn booked for June and she had to cancel just a few months before coming.  I took Ellen on a surprise Valentines trip to Savannah and I asked our friend Mark Sloan, a frequent visitor and Director of The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, what we should see while there.  He told us we had to see the retrospective show he curated of Aldwyth’s work at the Jepson Center.  We were a tad embarrassed because the travelling show, Aldwyth: work v. / work n. - Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009 (spend some time on this site--it is amazing!), had premiered at the Ackland Art Museum in 2009 and we had missed it in our own backyard.  We were absolutely blown away-we had never seen anything like this show.  The work was extraordinary and Mark had done a brilliant job with the show and made it incredibly accessible.  We both knew immediately that we had to have Aldwyth come to Cassilhaus.

Mark had built this narrative about Aldwyth being a reclusive 74 year-old artist who lived totally outside the art world in a tree house on an island off the coast of South Carolina. We thought getting her to come was a long shot at best. Ellen and I agreed we would play up the privacy of the place and that she could be really isolated. Mark connected us and we hit it off immediately and she enthusiastically agreed to come for a residency.  We were not prepared for a gregarious, friendly, and open dynamo of a woman that knew more about art history and the art world than a room full of MOMA curators. It would appear that Mark can dabble in hyperbole on occasion. Aldwyth was like having another member of the family in the house and we had a ton of fun. Her only nod to reclusivity was that she didn’t like to be photographed.

We had learned a bit about her process at the show in Savannah but were very curious about what she might tackle during her time at Cassilhaus.  Some of her past collage projects have taken years to complete. During her residency, Aldwyth embarked on a project to produce a visual representation of the 2003 Mellon Lecture series delivered by curator Kirk Varnadoe during the last few months of his life and documented in the book Pictures of Nothing. It takes its name from a quip by Hazlitt about abstract art.  The series of 6 lectures covered the period of abstract art since Pollack.

To our surprise Aldwyth said she never used photocopies of anything-all of her collage work comes from original printed material. She had about 8 copies of the book and proceeded to cut them all up to pursue 3 or 4 completely different approaches to the work. Even at the end of her stay at Cassilhaus she had not yet decided on the final approach she would take with the piece.  She explored chronological and thematic approaches and every day brought a new configuration of images all over the floor and walls of the artist studio.

The only requirement we have of our visiting artists is that they do one thing during their stay—a small exhibition, an artist talk or lecture, a workshop, etc.-to engage the local arts community.  Aldwyth went above and beyond the call. She brought a good deal of her smaller 3D work with her to do a nice show in the gallery.

We also did our first ever collaboration with the Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill with a conversation with Aldwyth and one of their curators as part of their Out of the Studio series.

The event also celebrated the Ackland's recent acquisition of the major Aldwyth work The World According to Zell.

The collage consists of thousands of images cut and meticulously assembled from a single volume of Zell's Encyclopedia.

We had a wonderful party after the talk and everyone got to see Aldwyth’s studio and the work in progress.

We miss Aldwyth dearly.  There was so much creativity and energy in the air while she was here. She really fulfilled the aspirations of our residency program. When asked to describe her stay she left us with this:

C – casual

A – adaptable

S – sensory

S – serendipitous

I – incredible

L – leisurely

H – hospitable

A – architectonic

U – unbelievable

S – SUBLIME

            --Aldwyth

After almost 2 years living here there seems to be no let up in interest in seeing the house.  The Triangle Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA-T) decided to get in on the house tour craze with their first annual AIA Triangle Tour of Homes. In a juried selection process they chose 9 homes in the Triangle and this past Saturday we had about 150 visitors.  It was a truly beautiful day.

Super Ticket Taker Michele was here all day greeting our visitors.

Super docent Esther passed out the goodies at the end of the tour.  

Bill and Jeffrey, our shuttle drivers, each did a half day shift bringing folks from a local church parking lot.  This allowed groups of 4-10 ea to tour at at time and a really nice chance to get to actually talk to folks.

The Rule sisters and Ashley were 4 of our 20 docents.  Thanks you guys!

Ellen explaining the finer points of Cassilhaus' architectural features.  She met a number of new prospective clients.

I was bummed that I didn't get to see the other houses on the tour.  Check out the website above.  There is some fabulous design going on in the Triangle.