Ann Belk is fearless when it comes to color. Caribbean blue, sunny yellow, fresh green, carnation pink - they make her happy.
So does working on the beach cottage on 54th Street in Virginia Beach that she and her husband, Jim Belk, bought four years ago.
There, the Richmond resident has loosed her love of juicy tropical hues and decor and her appreciation for art.
The first hint of that will be apparent from the outside April 23 during Historic Garden Week in Virginia's Virginia Beach Tour, this year called Charming Old Cottages by the Sea.
The Belks recently repainted the exterior of their 1958 ranch, just over the dunes from the ocean. Their house is now yellow and white with crisp black-and-white-striped awnings, wrought iron garden appointments and a pergola to trace a brick path to the front door. The color scheme of exterior plantings - yellow, blue and white - deliberately introduces what's inside.
"We love it down here all year, even in winter," Ann Belk said. " We never close the house. We spent New Years here and love to come down on cold nights and have a fire."
They enjoy the warmth from a Victorian sofa she found in a junk shop. The curvaceous couch was already a bargain at $100.
"It didn't have any legs and when I asked about them, he said it would cost me a hundred and a half with the legs on," she recalled, laughing. "I said, 'Oh golly, well darn.' "
Of course, she paid, then ran for new upholstery - a leafy, tropical print, an indoor/outdoor fabric perfect for a beach house and fringe to graze the floor.
Now the sofa sets the island mood Belk enjoys, echoed by sheer white panels at the windows and two ornate wrought iron armchairs. She added a cheetah-print rug for pure sass and bamboo accents that she repeated in other rooms.
"I wanted to go for the look of the tropics of another era," she said. "I love a palmy look."
On the walls, she used a buttery yellow called Roman Chamomile. For more than six years, Belk was gallery director of Brazier Fine Art in Richmond and, for a number of years, snapped up numerous works of art for herself. This gathering room as well as the entire home showcases the couple's many paintings.
She especially enjoys one large work, a scene of Portugal by South Carolina artist Joe Cave. Underneath it is an acrylic sculpture of a female nude the color of recycled glass. A hand-painted fire screen inherited from Belk's great-aunt was once a boudoir appointment.
Another heirloom is in the light green dining room. Belk's grandparents' dining table was bought in 1910 while they lived in the Philippines. The tabletop is a solid piece of wood 61 inches in diameter. Over it, Belk hung a chandelier decorated with parrots.
"It's on permanent loan from a friend of mine," she joked. Underfoot is a recent find - a large, brightly colored needlepoint rug with a parrot and tropical flower motif.
For about three years in Richmond, Belk and a friend ran Mambo, a gallery of Haitian art. That was where a client commissioned a painting of The Last Supper that ended up with Belk. She loves its multicultural faces of Jesus and the disciples.
An oak ladies desk holds a wooden, Haitian carved fish and the desk's closed flap hides a little secret - the family uses it a sunscreen station.
Belk keeps an eye out for art when she travels. That's how she found artist Carolyn Biggio. The bright sunflowers, hydrangeas and slice of cantaloupe in Biggio's painting attracted Belk while on a visit to New Orleans. She mixed new and old accessories on the sideboard - antique cranberry glass, contemporary candlestick lamps and a moss-green and brown swirl-patterned glass bowl.
She also likes two oil stick- on-paper motifs of desserts by Richmond artist Greig Leach, perfect where people linger over food and conversation.
Belk's sunroom contains another family piece - a wooden chest with two keyholes made in the Philippines, also from her grandparents.
Bamboo-motif shades on the windows further the tropical theme, and more oils by Biggio - again bright paintings of fruit and flowers - decorate the walls. They hang near a Haitian wedding scene in which a spurned suitor spies through an open window. A framed silk scarf painted with autobiographical scenes was made by Belk's mother-in-law and, serendipitously, contains the tropical colors Belk loves.
The serene master bedroom is a mini-art gallery. A heavily textured oil painting from Honfleur, France, is of a blue vase of purple iris and two goldfish in a bowl. A beach sunset saturated with tangerines and Caribbean blues is by Texan Vicki McMurray.
A painting of a surfer in crashing waves is from Maine. A large box decorated with a mermaid was painted by a dear friend, Georgia Terry, who died last year.
The Belks' kitchen is a work in progress. They installed a Viking stove and plan an integrated wine refrigerator on a wall decorated with a dyptich of red onions above a pine wardrobe they purchased with the house. Nearby hangs an unusual papier mache bust of a Haitian woman. A basket on her head brims with fresh produce and game.
The first guest bedroom, in the converted garage, contains a tiny powder room and unusual in-room shower. A painting of a wedding between a rooster and guinea fowl is a sarcastic political statement, Belk said, about two Haitian regimes - that of "Papa Doc" Francois Duvalier and Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
This red, blue, yellow and white room also contains two loas, or Haitian spirit paintings. "Good spirits," Belk said. Another piece of Haitian art depicts a voodoo ceremony.
At the entrance to the room is a collection of Jim Belk's antique duck decoys and nearby in the hall are three flags in one enormous frame that also belong to him.
Ann Belk paused to give her husband, an enthusiastic sport fisherman, his due.
"It is evidently unusual to catch all three of these fish in one trip," she said. "This is my husband's grand slam - a sailfish, a white marlin and a blue marlin. That was a big deal."
For the record, the deed was done in Abaco, the Bahamas, on May 12, 2004.
Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2732, krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com