Home's Provocative Paint Job Draws Spectrum of Reaction From Town
By Sandhya Somashekhar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
When Amy and Curtis Olson decided to freshen up the aging paint job on their graceful Victorian home in rural western Loudoun County, they knew their unusual color choice would make a splash in their conservative little town, with its tidy lawns, American flags and cream and gray facades.
So Amy Olson first broke the news to Eugene Simpson next door, an octogenarian who has lived in his sturdy white house for more than 40 years. "Well," he told her gruffly, "as long as it's not purple or something."
Olson sighed.
"I had to tell him, 'Well, it is going to be purple,' " recalled Olson, 45, seated in her forest green dining room in a lavender T-shirt. "He was so nice about it."
And now, purple it is -- a deep, rich periwinkle so unusual that it had to be specially mixed at the paint store. The house painters have nicknamed it "Olson purple."
It is set off by a wine-colored trim and a mustard rocking chair on the front porch, and it is surrounded by a boisterous garden watched over by fairies and frogs that peak through the foliage.
This extreme home makeover, which took place in July, has not gone unnoticed by the 718 people who live in the town of Hamilton. Founded in the 19th century as a country retreat, it retains its rural personality despite the trickle of city folk who have settled there in recent decades to escape urban life.
The town proper is about a mile long, extending a block or two in both directions from Colonial Highway, where the Olsons live. Its corporate limits are roughly flanked by a post office on one end and a restaurant named the Beautiful South on the other.
The Olson house is a popular source of gossip at the Natural Mercantile Store, where some shoppers have expressed outrage at the audacity of people who would do something so jarring to their peaceful community. One of the Olsons' neighbors simply stood outside the house shortly after the paint job was finished and pointed disgustedly into his throat.
A handful of offended neighbors complained to town officials that purple seemed more San Francisco than small-town Virginia, only to be told it's one of the joys -- or curses, depending on one's point of view -- of living in a town unencumbered by restrictions on the appearance of homes.
"This is small-town America, where you can do things like this," said Craig Green, 41, a Town Council member whose pale-yellow home is notable for its "Bush Lied" sign out front. "It's part of the charm."
Purple, it seems, has a special power on the exterior of a home. A Florida man invited the wrath of his town two years ago by painting his house purple and gold, the colors of his college fraternity. Outraged community leaders ordered him to repaint his home a more genteel color approved by them.
Painting one's house purple can also be an act of defiance. A Greensboro, N.C., resident once painted his house a particularly outrageous shade of violet to protest new regulations for his historical neighborhood.
The landlord of a house near Texas Tech University took the same action a few years ago -- punctuating it with huge smiley faces -- to show his displeasure over a city anti-crowding ordinance.
A common misconception is that purple is a traditional Victorian shade, said Elan Zingman-Leith, a historical preservationist and author of several books about Victorian homes. In fact, he said, purple house paint did not exist in the late 1800s. It wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, when San Franciscans began turning their Victorian rowhouses into "painted ladies," that such colors became fashionable.
These days, Zingman-Leith said, "you can cause crisis in a town by painting your house purple. You can start a revolution. You can inspire bigger fits than if you built a gambling den."
Especially, he added, in Virginia, "where no one can have a house that doesn't look like George Washington lived there."
But aside from a few snide passersby -- and private comparisons to the child-hypnotizing TV dinosaur Barney -- the Olsons have received little ribbing from their neighbors. Some of them adore their new town landmark.
"I just love it," said Michelle Grisé, 46, who works at the mercantile store and dropped the family a thank-you card for bringing a smile to her face. "I just think it is so beautiful and so tastefully done."
The Olsons selected the color this year when it became apparent that the peeling white paint, while a great palette for the family's elaborate Halloween display, had to go.
Amy Olson, a stay-at-home mother of two, saw the color scheme in a magazine and decided, with her husband's enthusiastic consent, that this would be just the cheerful transformation the family needed.
"I knew I was just meant to live in a purple house," said Amy Olson, who plans to add shutters in the same burgundy shade as the trim, with stars and moons cut out of the wood.
Curtis Olson, 46, liked the bold statement a purple house would convey. "If someone's not mad at you, you're mediocre," he said, his tie-dyed T-shirt laced with violet.
At first, the Olsons' 12-year-old son, Jack, feared that his family would be mistaken for aging San Francisco hippies, which, except for the San Francisco part, is pretty much the case. But he has come to appreciate what a friend once referred to as his "sweet pimp house."
Even those who were taken aback by the dramatic hue are looking on the bright side, including Joylyn Hannahs, a council member who lives two doors down in a lemon-yellow Victorian.
"I love the cranberry doors," Hannahs, 34, said cheerily. "The touch of yellow on the porch is delightful. And her house is a great landmark for me when I guide people to my house."
The Olsons were most worried, though, about how their 85-year-old next-door neighbor was coping with the change.
A retired postal worker who served in the military during World War II, Simpson is officially the oldest man in town -- an honor bestowed on him in 2002, when he received a wood cane possessed by every oldest Hamiltonian since the early 1900s.
When the color began going up on the walls of the Olson house, "I had some wild thoughts," he confided without elaborating.
But on a recent evening, while sitting in his snug mahogany-colored living room, he admitted that he, too, has come around to the purple house.
"As it grows on me, it really doesn't look that bad," he said. "I have no objections."
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