111-113 Stewart Street

Description

My potter's wheel lives in the garage studio, and it has since the week I moved in. There's a full bath and a small kitchenette as well, so a day covered in clay and glaze ends with a real shower and a cup of tea, not a duck walk through the house in wet clogs. Above the workbench is a loft I use for sleeping when I pull a late night before a show, though most of the time it's just storage for drying shelves and finished inventory. The main house has two entrances that make the whole arrangement work. One door opens straight into the gallery on the ground floor, where customers browse the shelves and never have to know I'm home. The other is mine alone, leading up to where I actually live. Downstairs used to be laid out as two bedrooms, and the bones still show it: enough room for real shelving and a proper gallery wall, a full kitchen where I keep tea going for browsers, and a full-size, side-by-side washer-dryer tucked beside it so glaze rags and dish towels get handled in the same load. Two fireplaces down there, both converted to gas logs, make the space feel like somewhere to linger rather than pass through. Cold months turn out to be my better sales months because of it. Upstairs is mine: two bedrooms, a full bath, and a kitchen nice enough that I actually cook most nights instead of ordering out. The living room fireplace runs on gas logs now, but I've thought about switching back to wood since it can do both. My favorite part is the sleeping porch, a detail from when the house was built, back when a good cross breeze mattered more than it does now. It still catches one most summer evenings. Down the path, the little building that started out as a writer's cottage in the 1920s earns its keep now as a short-term rental. Whoever built it kept the lot doubled up around it, a buffer of native mountain laurel, rhododendron, and mature hardwoods that still gives the cottage its own quiet, separate from the rest of the property. There's a full bath and a stacked washer-dryer tucked into the kitchen, so guests staying a few nights don't have to ask me for anything. It runs on its own septic system, separate from the city sewer that serves the main house and studio, though the tie-in to switch it over is already in place. Most of the year it's just a place for guests to stay; during festival season I list a "pottery experience" alongside the booking (a couple of hours at the wheel, priced separately), and that add-on carries me through the slower months. Afternoons, if the shop's quiet, I walk to A Southern Cup Fine Teas, about four minutes down Greenville Highway. Flat Rock Wood Room is even closer, and their wood-fired Neapolitan is dinner more often than I'd admit. Neither trip requires getting in a car. I take a booth at the Apple Festival every year, worth the short drive for all the foot traffic. Down the road, Boxwoods and I keep a standing trade going: a few of his home goods sit on my shelves, and he keeps a handful of my pieces on his. Weekends without a festival booked, I'm usually at the Blue Ridge Humane Society, sorting donations or walking a dog that needs the practice. The house remained in the same family from 1944 until the day I bought it. Along the way, the wiring and plumbing were updated in both the main house and the writing cottage, and the garage itself became the studio between 2011 and 2019, which is when its wiring and plumbing went in. All three buildings got new roofs in 2020. Everything here was already built to support exactly this kind of life; whoever's next just has to decide what to make of it.