catfish pond, rode horses and enjoyed an abundance of outdoor space. Carbon’s aesthetic sense, on the other hand, is very different from the suburban surroundings of his youth. He grew up in a 1970s brick house, but has an affinity for old houses and weathered patinas. He prefers the beauty of peeling plaster over new sheetrock. “When I walked in the house, I knew I didn’t want to destroy it,” he says. “I loved the house the way it was.” He removed the wallpaper himself and scraped the original plaster walls with a razor, leaving them with an aged, Old World look. He renovated the small kitchen and laid new marble tile in the bathroom, sheet-rocked several rooms damaged by Hurricane Katrina, painted some of the trim and windows, bricked the garden paths and replaced the light fixtures. “I guess some people come into the house and think I’m in the middle of working on it,” Carbon says, noting that he likes the worn appearance of the water stains on the ceiling and purposely hasn’t done away with them. A serendipitous series of events led Carbon to the house, and he is protective of its heritage and character. “I was a second-year (medical) resident and I wasn’t looking for a house,” he recalls. Carbon learned about the property from a coworker who happened to live in a sister cottage next door (both, Carbon says, were built by the same man for his two daughters). The previous owner, a doctor, had become ill and the co-worker asked Carbon if he would be interested if the house came up for sale. Carbon met the family, fell in love with the place and was offered a bargain price. “They took me through the house and told me stories,” he says. “I was there for hours. It was
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like they really wanted me to have the house.” Carbon’s appreciation for the gracefully eroded style presented in Richard Sexton’s 1993 book Elegance and Decadence is obvious throughout the house, which has 13-and-a-half-foot ceilings and is home to a wealth of religious art, largely collected from Bush Antiques. His love of collecting, like his passion for gardening, began at an early age. He was a teenager when he began collecting Fiestaware and 20 when he acquired his first beveled mirror. He also owns dozens of cobalt blue medicine page 22
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