ST. LEO - Katharine T. Carter's house is all about color: the yellow of key limes, the turquoise of the Aegean, the deep, hibiscus pinks of Palm Beach Island.
The courtyard-wrapped house Carter designed and built in 1993 speaks to first-time visitors soul-to-soul.
"I love color, and I want to live a colorful life. There's a lot of energy to color, something very charged about it," explains Carter, whose Pasco-based art-exhibition company presents artists and their works at museums and galleries nationwide.
"I also like the flamboyance and happiness color can bring to a space or life."
In fact, color reaches down her long, live oak canopied drive and pulls like a magnet. Striped peach and magenta wooden doors speckled with fat stars are thrown open to a Mexican-style courtyard. Walk through a garland of bougainvillea beneath a clear Florida sky and the experience becomes ethereal.
It leaves a visitor blinking in the heat, dazzled.
Carter opens the door, her black standard poodle, C zanne at her side. A rescue dog, Czanne came with his name.
It's the kind of serendipity that follows Carter everywhere she goes, almost like magic.
A fourth-generation Pasco County resident, she's the granddaughter of pioneers in the concentrate-juice and citrus packing industries. Her father was Jim Fair, perhaps Tampa's most famous political warrior, advocate for the poor and decorated World War II hero.
Carter, 54, who holds a bachelor's degree in photography from the University of Florida and a master's degree in painting from the University of South Florida, spent years as an artist until a car accident in the late 1980s temporarily destroyed the feeling in her arms.
As a result, she decided to give a little of her magic to other artists, mostly those at mid career, for whom she organizes exhibitions complete with catalogs, announcement cards and news releases.
She launched the business in New York but brought it home to Pasco more than a decade ago.
She bought land in St. Leo, designed her house on graph paper, and painted it the colors that she lives and breathes.
Taking her inspiration both in design and color from Mexican architect Luis Barragan, she even painted the concrete floors ocean blue.
Quotes that offer inspiration and humor are printed on the walls:
"Just do your job, then let go."
"God is love, but get it in writing."
"Remember wherever you go, there you are."
Besides her penchant for combining color in fresh and unexpected ways, Carter is a great collector of the really interesting - from good friends to beautiful old silver to rare photographs, including one of the famous New Yorker magazine writer, Dorothy Parker, aging and conflicted, holding a pet poodle.
The most noticeable of her collections, though, are her rabbits, thousands of them, whimsical, cartoonish, sometimes disturbing, scattered through the house, nestled among her serious collections of art and antiques. Rabbit gourds and hand-carved primitives adorn the shelves of her airy, galley-style kitchen. A painting of a rabbit dressed as a minister and clutching a Bible hangs in her bedroom. Strings of rabbit lights illuminate the night.
A fuchsia rabbit hangs in the window overlooking the courtyard and two of her four cats are named for bunnies: Harry (spelled Hare) and Jack Rabbit.
She likes what rabbits symbolize, their universal meaning of fertility and abundance.
"I've been fascinated with rabbits since childhood," she explains. "And many have been given to me over the years by good friends."
Her corporate logo is a jumping hare.
And a 21-foot rabbit painted on the bottom of her swimming pool offers a surprise for swimmers.
"I've told her before that I think she should open a bunny museum," says William Zimmer, contributing art critic to the New York Times who was visiting Carter earlier this week.
Carter won't open her home as a museum to the public, but it's a haven for good friends who gather in her living room "conversation pit" where art critics and educators from across the country often come to speak.
She devotes rooms to themes and holidays, creating spaces that invite conversation and thought: A Halloween room is filled with serious black-and-white photography and the not-so-serious, including Wizard of Oz figurines and pumpkin lights. A Christmas tree bedecked in silver ornaments and fistfuls of tinsel stands year round.
Easter ornaments dangle from the chandeliers.
In her bedroom, a bejeweled rabbit made by an artist in Atlanta is covered with the treasures of her past: jewelry from her grandmother, her Kappa Sigma little sister pin, her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority pin from the early 1970s at the University of Florida.
"I was kicked out for going braless," she confides.
The rabbit, hollow in the center, and opened with a press of a pink jewel, will hold her ashes someday.
Her bed, a heavy Victorian antique purchased in upstate New York, she painted buttery yellow to look French provincial. Above it, hang her own edgy black-and-white geometric paintings from years ago. And arrangements of stuffed animals, seashells and candles form what Carter calls "little altars."
Her grown son, Carter Burns, an investment banker in New York, tells her that her house is like a game show "because every room is different," Carter says with a laugh.
Even the back yard evokes the slightly zany feel of a Let's Make a Deal set: Colored plastic lawn chairs in a rainbow of shades beckon visitors to slip outside for some conversation beneath the oaks.
Of course, Carter's keen eye for design and passion for bold color, make it all work. She even lets the Florida sun work the colors like musical notes.
"I love the way color changes at different times of day," she says. "I love the mutability of it, the way it becomes an extension of what you are inside."
- Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached ebettendorf@hotmail.com My House is a feature that profiles interesting homes and people responsible for the Pasco housing boom.
