By the time I reached our hostess Julia Turnipseed’s home, I looked every bit a drowned rat. Just four miles away in Tutwiler it wasn’t raining, but in Sumner my car wasn’t wide enough to straddle a full storm drain puddle. Walking past all the umbrellas on the front porch, I wanted to turn and run. Nonsense, Julia welcomed me and graciously ushered me to a chair I’d be least likely to ruin.
Our guest speaker, award-winning architect Frances Flautt Zook, opened her presentation recounting her ties to visiting her cousins in the delta, including our hostess. Having grown up in Greenwood, her family home was built by Jack DeCell, a Yale-trained architect who also built our treasurer Sylvia Murphey’s home.
Frances developed a strong client base throughout the Southeast, having lived in Georgia, Texas and Washington, D.C. Her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects, Atlanta Home Magazine, Delta Magazine, Southern Home and more.
Just imagine picking up a magazine in any waiting room and seeing beautiful photos of beautifully designed homes starting with just a client’s wish list and often a footprint that can’t be expanded. That’s Frances’ job. She creates spaces where there were often none to hide a collection of prized automobiles.
Many clients want a second home on a manmade lake or a remodel of a current home. Some of her photos show such a drastic change it would take an architect to convince you it was the same home.
Around these parts, we are accustomed to seeing large metal storage sheds for farm equipment. Working within the existing footprint, removing a front flat wall, creating a sweeping angled roof line, adding cypress siding and fiddling around inside with all the things that make a barn shed a home, it’s another wonder to behold.
Making her home in Oxford, Frances is president-elect of the Friends of the Museum Board of the University. She serves on the architectural review board for Splinter Creek, an environmentally conscious lakefront near Oxford. No outboard motors are allowed, only paddles or quiet electric motors swimming and fishing.
On Splinter Creek, Frances has built one home for a well-known children’s author, Sara Frances Hardy. They refer to this home as a treehouse due to it being situated high amongst the pines. Sadly, those very pines were badly damaged during our recent ice storm but like native plants are resilient and will thrive in a bit.
I am always awed by the people who cross our path in such a small delta area — the music, the arts, writers, photographers.
I am so fortunate I found my way home. When I left in 1969, I spent my youth refurbishing four houses — the kind of work you do on your knees stripping or sanding hardwood floors and steaming wallpaper off walls while you live with a table saw in your living room. I can match the tiniest butterfly wallpaper antenna seamlessly. My skills were self-taught, mostly because the houses we refurbished didn’t have the value to warrant hiring professionals, but we put enough lipstick on for four pigs to feel creatively happy.
In my whole life, I never imagined I would meet these delta people like Frances, who tells others how to build her creations and Maude and Langdon Clay, who take the finished magazine photographs.
I’m betting once the magazines are on the coffee table and in the waiting room, those most precious creative artistic pieces hit the refrigerator. The traced hands of grandbabies, the colored feet of great-grandchildren framed by your bedside table. The scribbled crayon of a child’s “I love you” sitting in your china cabinet.
These are our future generations of artists and architects, so don’t fuss at crayon marks on the walls, for heaven’s sake. Encourage that art. It’s the Mississippi Delta’s legacy.
Horticulture study: This is the time to open your eyes and see the daffodils around Sumner. Every single yellow bloom you see popping up in public areas — the entry to town along the highway, around the courthouse, post office and all along the bayou — was the work and heartfelt dream of Judith Mitchener. Why? Just because she loves them. She’s another of our delta treasures with ears to hear, eyes to see and hands to work in God’s finest soil.
