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Home a highlight for tour and owners

A 1937 cottage in New Suburb Beautiful will be featured for the Amaryllis Garden Circle's ninth annual Garden Tour.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published March 31, 2006

NEW SUBURB BEAUTIFUL - Mary and Mark McKell's house tends to make people stop and sigh.

Pale-moon yellow with big green batten shutters, a picket fence and a back porch big enough to throw a dinner party, the house begs for its own spread in a homes magazine. In fact, the quaint 1937 cottage with its French garden filled with boxwood hedges, herbs and climbing roses was featured several years ago in Better Homes and Gardens.

The home will be in the spotlight again Sunday when the Amaryllis Garden Circle hosts its ninth annual Garden Tour.

At $7 a ticket, the tour features three gardens and a wine and cheese stop in a neighborhood long considered perhaps Tampa's most beautiful and quietly understated.

During the years, the garden circle has used the tour's proceeds to beautify the area, especially beneath the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway at Howard and Watrous avenues, where devoted members transformed urban grit into a meditative refuge with a fountain and artful landscaping.

"This tour is all about being proud of our neighborhood and wanting to share it with people,'' said Mary McKell, co-president of the Amaryllis Garden Circle. "It's the kind of neighborhood where the sidewalks bring people out to talk over the fence. There's a real sense of place here.''

During the tour, guests can climb old stairs to McKell's guesthouse and view the handprints made by a child in the 1940s and a sleeping suite that offers a heavenly view of the gardens below.

The garden, designed by the home's previous owners, Annie and Colin Moore (who have since moved to France), is known as a parterre because it is made up of planting beds edged in manicured hedging and interesting paths created from gorgeous mossy brick.

"Parterres were meant to be viewed from above,'' McKell said one afternoon as she gazed down at a large iron globe that stood in the center of the small, formal garden that looks a lot like historic gardens in Charleston, S.C.

The most famous parterre gardens include those at the Chateau of Versailles and Kensington Palace.

The McKells grow rosemary, lavender and other herbs inside the parterre garden, staples for Mark, who is a passionate cook and steps out the kitchen door to pluck what he needs.

Mary McKell had long admired the house on her regular walks through the neighborhood.

"It definitely had that old cottage feel - with a picket fence and shutters,'' she said. "I had been looking at this house, and the night it went on the market, a friend who is a Realtor came over to tell me about it.''

Even six years ago, the 2,400-square-foot cottage with its Lilliputian guesthouse, gazebo and potting shed was priced for a South Tampa pocketbook "and twice our budget,'' Mary McKell said.

But after Mark McKell, who works in commercial real estate, fell just as hard for the house, they decided to buy it.

During the years, the house has evolved into the couple's sanctuary, a relaxed environment in which they entertain and raise their two young daughters.

Mary McKell, 44, has infused the home with her own artistically eclectic decorating style that she teasingly calls "high funk,'' in which vintage needlepoint pillows mingle with Ruby Williams folk art, garage sale finds and monogrammed slip-covered antique dining room chairs.

It's the perfect place for their family, she said of the house with its well-worn Persian runner, children's paintings on the walls and a goldfish in a bowl on the piano. On a mild spring afternoon, daughters Mia, 6, and Annie, 3, whirled through the house in a parade of costumes that included tutus and mermaid-fairy gowns.

"The neighborhood kids line up to play on the swings,'' Mary McKell said of the wooden rope swings (made by Mark) that hang from a canopy of oaks shading the front yard.

In back, the grownups gather for meals in a garden that is both dreamy and carefully planned. The planted areas teem with fragrant herbs and old-fashioned pink climbing roses. Water arcs from a fountain into a raised concrete fishpond. Beneath a chandelier hanging from a shade tree stands a long, wooden, farm-style table and matching benches, also made by Mark McKell, 46.

The table will be set for the garden tour, compliments of the South Tampa home goods store Magnolia. Mary McKell planned to serve wine and hors d'oeuvres from the long open-air back porch so big that it actually holds a porch swing. Moss is beginning to sprout on the white railings, a look that she welcomes and cultivates.

She likes sophisticated, lived-in decor inside and out. You might call it the style of New Suburb Beautiful.

"Some neighborhoods are fabulous and grand, but you never think you could live there,'' Mary McKell said. "We literally have lemonade stands and children jumping rope. That's what kind of place this is.''

[Last modified March 30, 2006, 14:01:53]