She started the popular Vintage Charlotte markets. Now peek inside her Plaza Midwood home
Amy Herman is a Charlotte arts pioneer, CPCC instructor, business owner and the curator of the ever-popular Vintage Charlotte. Amy took us on a tour of her Plaza Midwood home and lets us in on some of the gritty projects it took to make her house a home in this edition of CharlotteFive Home Tours.
How did you end up here?
My husband Kurtis and I moved to Charlotte a little more than five years ago. We had just returned from traveling abroad and had all of our stuff in storage. Before we went abroad we were living in Chicago and though we loved it there, we knew we couldn’t do six months of winter anymore. We decided to road trip into the South in search of a city that felt progressive, with an arts scene for me and potential for engineering jobs for Kurtis. Long story short, we moved to Charlotte on a whim because of the weather.
Favorite thing about your neighborhood?
Our house is in Plaza Midwood. The absolute best thing about our neighborhood is that it is walkable. It only takes us about five minutes to walk to all of the businesses in PM. I also love that we are able to enjoy all of the benefits of walkability and still have a nice sized yard for my garden and for our chickens. We looked at a million houses before buying ours — it took us about eight months to find it!
Favorite/least favorite parts of your home?
This is kind of a hard question for me, I don’t really have any least favorite parts. Our house was such a HUGE project, but that means we really got to make our house exactly what we wanted it to be. There are a few things that I absolutely love about our house and a few things that were added bonuses.
We spent a long time planning how to add on to our house and in the end we took advice from our architect friend and creatively reused the existing rooms in order to give us the freedom to add on one big open space as our living room/dining room/kitchen.
The new space is definitely the heart of our home and where we spend the majority of our time. For the first time, I am really starting to spend time decorating our spaces which is fun because we have a huge collection of art and found vintage objects.
Something that I love about our property that was a total surprise to us is that there are a variety of fruit trees. We bought our house in early February so we got a really nice surprise the first summer when we discovered peaches, plums, figs and a rare fruit called che. Unfortunately, the yard was in such bad condition and so overgrown that some of the fruit trees were diseased and had to be removed. We have done our best to nurse the others back to health and added in an additional peach tree, two apple trees and a pomegranate tree.
If you can’t tell, we are really into the idea of living off the land: Our chickens free range in the backyard and produce eggs, I have a large vegetable garden that I tend to year round and we have also planted a raspberry patch and kiwi vine, grape vine and herb garden.
What advice would you give on in-home entertaining?
We love entertaining. It definitely influenced our decisions while we were designing our addition. I think my best advice is to do it often with people you love. I think some of my favorite nights in Charlotte have been spent around a bonfire in our backyard.
What has been the most innovative DIY project you’ve done?
Ha! Literally our entire house. When we bought our house, we were looking for a project, but this has probably been a much larger project then we were originally looking for!
The existing house was only about 850 square feet (two bedrooms, one bath) and needed everything. We stripped the entire house and refinished all of the surfaces. We did all of this work ourselves while we were still living in an apartment in Elizabeth. We moved in once we had a completed bathroom. We roughed it for a while: living among construction, using a hot plate to cook our meals and went a winter without heat.
The addition adds about 700 square feet (bringing the total to three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms). We hired out some of the work for the addition (framing, plumbing, drywall) but we were the general contractors and have done a ton of the work ourselves. We still have a few big projects to finish.
We are working on the master bathroom now and plan to install decorative beams on the cathedral ceilings in the addition. Sometimes it feels like we will never be done, but when I look at the before photos, I am amazed at all we have done.
Want to be featured in the Home Tours section of Charlotte Five? Email Liz at lizloganeagle@gmail.com.
Photos: Amy Herman
This story was originally published May 23, 2017 at 11:23 PM with the headline "She started the popular Vintage Charlotte markets. Now peek inside her Plaza Midwood home."