By Sarah Paynter
On a warm morning in June 2023, a bartender served Bloody Marys on the lawn behind a pink stucco Modernist-style home in Savannah, Ga. Guests devoured fried chicken and salads under dusty pink umbrellas, said their hostess Rebecca Gardner. Her guests chatted while their children ran around the roughly one-third acre property in Ardsley Park, about 2 miles south of downtown Savannah.
"To hell with an Hermès Birkin. The ultimate luxury is a nap. I like to start summer parties early with festive day drinks," said Gardner, who is in her early 40s. "Then you can hit the hay."
Gardner, the Corpus Christi, Texas-born founder of House & Parties, a party, interior design and retail business, has hosted countless soirees for her friends and neighbors at the circa-1947 house with curved bay windows. Since buying the home for $500,000 in 2018, she spent about $1.25 million on its renovation, equipping it to host large parties at a moment's notice. Now, Gardner is looking for her next renovation project, so she's listing the four-bedroom, roughly 4,200-square-foot house for $2.25 million with Staci Donegan of Seabolt Real Estate.
Gardner, who lives with her French bulldog, Percy, converted the home's two-car garage into a high-end storage closet lined with built-in cabinets to store dishes and tablecloths. Its independent air conditioning unit creates chilly temperatures necessary to prepare floral arrangements on stainless-steel tables. Its refrigerator serves as a stockpile for ready-to-serve Cosmos frozen in plastic bags. And after "shopping" in her supplies closet, Gardner carts selected napkins and cups inside on a red trolley, powder coated to match her kitchen's bold red cabinets, she said.
The party-ready home has four separate bars, strategically positioned to encourage guests to spread out throughout the house. The pink-plaster living room has a small rattan bar, and the sunken dining room has a bar covered in a pink taffeta tablecloth. Gardner gave the card room a 1960s reeded bar, and she put a 1970s wrought-iron bar outside to serve guests in her backyard, she said.
"There's nothing worse than having everyone end up in one room, or even worse, if they end up in your damn kitchen, that is the kiss of death," said Gardner, explaining that "bars act as a party siren beckoning guests to the room where you want them to be."
For her renovation, Gardner filled the home with colorful, nostalgic decor, using pastels, bright colors and playful sculptures. She preserved its original wood floors, repaired its curved plaster walls, reglazed the original steel casement windows and regrouted the old Vitrolite glass bathroom tile.
Gardner said she spent countless hours searching through old receipts and letters from the home's original construction in the 1940s that are in the Georgia Historical Society archives in Savannah. She identified missing fixtures and finishes and spent years acquiring roughly 75-year-old features including pink porcelain sinks with chrome legs and matching toilets. "I felt like the Pink Panther" tracking down antiques dealers selling the old fixtures, she said.
Surrounded by Diet Cokes and architectural records in the archives, Gardner said she began to feel a connection to the home's original owner, Harry Reiner, whom she calls "the snappy Mr. Reiner." Reiner, who founded a women's clothing store, raised his blended family there with his second wife, Nora Reiner. They liked to play cards in a high-tech room with a music player built into the wall, said Reiner's daughter Susan Reiner Lourie. Reiner sold the house following his wife's death in 1965, and in the following decades, it had several owners and a few renters, trading hands for $65,000 in 1978 and for $325,000 in 2004, according to property records.
Gardner learned that prominent Savannah architect Cletus Bergen's design for the house was inspired by a "Home of Tomorrow" illustration clipped out of a magazine, still on file in Bergen's records. Though it wasn't stuccoed pink until decades later, longtime neighbors say the once-brick house always stood out among Neoclassical and other revival-style homes in the historic Ardsley Park neighborhood, said Gardner.
"I like the idea that he had the confidence to build what was then a pretty wild house right after the second World War," said Gardner. "I've always thought that Harry Reiner could have been my man had I been born a little earlier."
Write to Sarah Paynter at Sarah.paynter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 29, 2024 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
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