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Homes

Front Porch: Artist shares shell love

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published May 20, 2005

Heather Kendall's voluptuous shell creations belong in a Victorian underwater mansion inhabited by mermaids.

Imagine chandeliers, fireplaces, lamp shades, vases, baskets, mirrors, garden urns, classical statuary, entire rooms for that matter, all overlaid with everything from pearly crushed shells to sea urchins to finds picked up on a beach walk along the Gulf of Mexico.

"I just truly love doing this, particularly making custom pieces for people. You name it, I'll shell it," says Kendall, a photo stylist who once booked fashion models for a living.

Kendall's exquisite shell work, which has been featured in Southern Living, is again spotlighted in the May 2005 issue of Garden Design.

To Kendall, 42, the willowy, likable, devoutly Christian mother of three boys, who grew up on Clearwater Beach, shells mean home. She spent her childhood romping on the beach until sunset with her cousins, diving for sand dollars, swimming, surfing and shelling.

She even met her future husband while out on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

She knows just about every beach in Florida by the sensual color palette of its shells. Her own shelling expeditions take her from the pier at Ballast Point to beaches near the Everglades to the upper Atlantic coastline, where she and her family like to surf.

"I go shelling everywhere from Old Tampa Bay to Venice Beach," she explains. "We go to the beach and surf and boat all the time."

She launched her business about five years ago with a few small, shell-encrusted designs that she sold to friends. Word spread and soon she was producing hundreds of items a month by herself from her Sunset Park home near West Shore Boulevard. She converted the family's garage into her studio, a cheerful, cavelike room brimming with hundreds of thousands of shells stored in clear plastic boxes. She makes her lamp shades and shell boxes on a bamboo turntable at her old dining room table, now draped with a fish-patterned tablecloth. Recently, she hired an assistant to help her meet the high volume of orders that flow in from her Web site www.elegantshells.com She is also a shell artist to some widely known names in the area, clients who have commissioned her for some labor intensive jobs. She has been asked to shell livingroom shelves, ceiling borders, fireplace mantels or, in one case, to help shell an entire beach house grotto.

Though you might not have heard of Kendall yet, her work is carried in stores from Sag Harbor, Long Island, to Naples. On May 20, a show of her shell designs opens at a store, Boca Botanica, in Boca Grande.

She'll even make mirrors or other decorative objects from a client's personal shell collection or restore valuable antique shell knickknacks. She recently repaired and reshelled part of a 1940s shell mirror for a client.

She knows that shell decor is sizzling hot right now.

She also prays, that like other interior design fads, it doesn't fade fast as a gulf sunset.

"Such a variety of people like shell designs," she says. "Some like crazy shell designs, others like very traditional looks in creamy palettes."

One Florida client, wanting something permanent and memorable in her living room alcove, recently asked for the most sentimental of shell designs, says Kendall.

"She asked me to shell the words "Forget me not.' "

[Last modified May 19, 2005, 08:41:13]