Cottage Life

Ryan Gainey has a tale to tell about everything in his cottage near Atlanta. The sink in his kitchen, the hydrangea in the garden, the walls in the dining room—even the 1926 cottage itself.

“When I came to Atlanta 30-something years ago, I got my first job at a flower shop for $3.50 an hour,” he says. “A man used to come by and sell cyclamens. I paid him a visit to see what he was growing and found this charming little cottage his family built. I just knew that one day I would live here.”

Ryan’s intuition was correct, as he bought the property piece by piece—first the main house about 25 years ago and finally the guest cottage five years ago—and set to work renovating the small cottage and landscaping the yard. The latter is Ryan’s first passion—he’s a talented garden designer well known for his artful, lush flower arrangements—but decorating, especially with antiques and vintage accessories, isn’t far behind.

Ryan built a mudroom off the kitchen to serve as a workstation for arranging blooms from his yard, then added a back entrance fitted with a salvaged wooden door. He painted the exterior a sunny yellow—inspired by cottages he saw on a trip to the Cotswolds in England; the interior, a creamy white; the floors, a natural blue-green. “I painted all the floors the same color so the house would feel larger and simpler,” Ryan says. “I’m not one who believes you need a red room and an orange room and a blue room in a small house. It makes it feel larger to have the same colors flow from one to the next.”

The dining room, however, was an exception. Before he could paint, Ryan had to strip off decades-old wallpaper. “It was a happy accident,” he says. “When I peeled the paper off, I liked the look, so I left it. People come over and ask me how do I it. I say, ‘Wallpaper your house, wait 30 years, then rip it off, and you’ll have the same patina.’ ”

Celebrating patina is paramount to Ryan. He buys few things that are new, and if they are, they’re usually crafted from old materials. “Most everything is handmade inside the cottage. I have a lot of friends who are very fine craftsmen, so I’d rather buy pieces from them than find things from stores,” he says. “In my own way, I’m leading my own personal Arts and Crafts movement.”

Just look around and you’ll see it: A friend built the dining table and chairs out of salvaged pine flooring from an old barn, and the cast-iron kitchen sink came from an antiques shop in Macon, Georgia. “I had a friend who worked for me for a long time, and his family owned that antiques shop,” Ryan says. “When he got married, I did his flowers. Then he left to go work for his family and asked, ‘What do I owe you?’ I took one look at him and said, ‘That sink.’ ”

In his office, Ryan surrounds himself with his family’s history, thanks to the photo collages that trace his ancestry. “I’m nauseatingly nostalgic,” he jokes. “My desk is an old kitchen table from the 1930s that was made by my favorite uncle.”

Ryan’s fondness for the past runs over into his vast lot. “My greatest pleasure is the constant revising of my garden—letting it change and making adjustments,” he says. Thick with old trees—including figs and an old “horse apple” (that Ryan says makes the best pies in the world)—the garden also includes bright blue hydrangeas descended from ones the original owners planted. Such living history is well suited for a man who loves a good story.

From Jessica Thuston of Cottage Living