By Joy Kraft
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Vine-covered open "living rooms" extend from either end of Anne Glossinger's home. (Steven M. Herppich photos) | ZOOM |

Anne Glossinger might have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she's traded it in for a hand trowel.

She doesn't mention her string of official Russian titles (Anna Pavlovna Ilyinsky, Princess Romanovskaja-Iljininskaja) as the granddaughter of a Russian grand duke and Audrey Emery. Her great-great aunt, Mary Emery, was one of Cincinnati's most generous philanthropists.

Instead, the down-to-earth owner of Belle Maison, a Hyde Park shop for home decor items, plants and flowers, would rather chat about her store and whipping up color-shot window boxes and planters for clients. The 45-year-old mother of four likes to keep her thumbs green and her hands dirty.

Inside Belle Maison is "everything needed for a beautiful home," she says - gift items, dining room treasures, crafts, seasonal decorating accessories, baskets, ceramics, one-of-a-kind finds and silk and cut flowers.

But don't look here for flowers and plantings neatly trimmed. The shop, and Glossinger's Indian Hill home, have the loose, comfy, slightly overgrown feel of an English garden.

Glossinger's Colonial Revival house with Spanish blue shutters that take on a purple tinge in the right light is more an extension of her shop than a McMansion with well-groomed but unused rooms.

The house is filled with handsome, deeply cushioned furniture, paintings - including a portrait of Audrey Emery presides over the dining room - and examples of a lively everyday life - from backpacks to sticky notes - and three dogs, a black Labrador retriever and two Jack Russell terriers.

Anne Glossinger's five-bedroom house was built in 1966. | ZOOM |

Flowers are everywhere, from meandering roses and wisteria carpeting the roof to the sunflowers, hydrangea and roses abloom in the living room's wool needlepoint rug.

"It is a big house," she says, "but there isn't a room we don't use because of the flow of the house."

It wasn't always that way.

Purchased in 1998, the five-bedroom house built in 1966 needed work.

"My first vision was a horrible screened-in porch, a tiny pool and perennial garden right outside the back with a beautiful expanse of lawn behind it," she says.

The Glossingers added a "tower" on each end of the home, several feet across the back for access to the back yard, and two open outdoor living rooms (about 40 feet long) on either side bordered by rambling gardens.

Guest house added

The home's space was increased by about half to nearly 4,000 square feet, including the guest house where Glossinger's daughter stays when home from college.

ANOTHER BELLE MAISON

Anne Glossinger's home decor and gift business is spreading to Madeira Sept. 23, with the opening of a second shop at 7710 Shawnee Run, near the intersection with Miami Avenue. The new 1,000-square-foot store is smaller than its 2,500-square-foot cousin in Hyde Park, but it has a downstairs that Glossinger is planning to use for children's theme parties. "We're hoping to use it for birthday and other theme parties, like cookie decorating, cake decorating and faerie garden parties," she says. Though it will not carry fresh-cut flowers, the new shop will be stocked with gifts, home accessories and silk flowers. Information: 561-5105.

Her directive for architect Michael Hamilton was that she needed to keep an eye on the children in the back yard from just about everywhere in the house.

The result is what she calls her "glass towers," one with a sunny master bath and bedroom converted from a previously unheated space over the garage, and the other an office.

"I can watch the kids while I work on the computer, from the kitchen and master suite upstairs," she says.

Glossinger describes the additions as "big treehouses." Downstairs, French doors off the living room bar open to bring the summer indoors. In winter, the ceiling spotlights convert to grow lights for the plants brought inside.

The outdoor living rooms with bamboo furniture stay busy after summer. Fountains and fireplaces make them cozy refuges "even in the snow," she says.

A pool in the distance draws your eye to the back of the yard and across the lush lawn, which Glossinger tends organically without a yard service. A vegetable garden and dog run are fenced on the side.

Mark Wessel helps keep the cottage gardens under control. "My husband (David) loves to weed," Glossinger says.

"The big cottage gardens suit the house and my lifestyle. They can be as high- or low-maintenance as you want. "I really like to have a variety for flower arranging."

"My whole family is into gardening," Glossinger says with pride. Even my brother Tim (Dmitri). He's the only male member of the Litchfield, Conn., Garden Club."

"I was lucky to have the experience of growing up on these beautiful old estates where gardening was instrumental.

I remember getting paid a penny for each Japanese beetle I picked off roses as a kid," she says.

Socially active childhood

It was her childhood, sprinkled with white-glove events and trips on her father's private train car, that gave her an appreciation for the trappings of fine living and eventually drew her into the retail business ... after a five-year stint managing a rock band ('Til Tuesday with singer Aimee Mann) following college in England.

"When the Woman's Exchange in Hyde Park closed, it seemed no one was doing hand-made gifts. There was no outlet for handmade clothes," Glossinger says.

Her solution, a little white shop called the Velvet Rabbit, opened about 1982 on Erie Avenue around the corner from her present shop. But a struggle with Hodgkin's lymph node cancer discovered while she was pregnant with her second child forced Glossinger to sell to the manager.

Following her physical recovery, a divorce, remarriage and a failed Madeira shop partnership, Glossinger found herself looking for another business.

"It took 18 months to find the spot. I wanted to design the interior of the store and have a workshop and flower shop and the right location," she says.

Was a framery

She found it, near the intersection of Herschel and Erie avenues (3520 Erie Ave.), the site of a framery in an outdated shopping strip in need of a facelift. Belle Maison opened two years ago.

"I really liked the idea of revitalizing the area," she says.

Today, the building is a successful renovation story with soft purple clematis framing the door and Glossinger's trademark window boxes and large urns artfully planted.

Robert Lee and Nancy LeClaire transform fresh cut and silk flowers into scene-stealers, and the shop offers full-service wedding planning from linens to china and flowers ... even orchestrating plantings that will boom in time for the event and filling containers customers bring in for their trademark work.

Glossinger describes her life as "being on vacation every day," despite the work at home and the shop that eats up her time.

"After five years lying in bed," she says, "you'll never get me to slow down."