Creating Thistle Downe

Gary Whitney and Molly Boren Whitney enjoy creating a magical world in their home. (Photo: lawellphoto.com)

Enter the home of Gary Whitney and Molly Boren Whitney, and, after being greeted by Ruby, an impossibly adorable Havanese, you will see a magical world, right there in their foyer, at the foot of their stairs. A house for fairies and trolls, built of twigs and pine cones and pebbles. A branch of oak leaves swoops down gracefully over it. A sparrow sits in her nest on the roof. And inside, fairies sweep the floor and peruse books in the two-story octagonal library and apply lipstick at a bathroom vanity made from a seashell.

The Whitneys call the house Thistle Downe.

And it’s about to be the setting for a new book, written and illustrated by Molly and Gary. Thistle Downe, for readers ages 9 to 14, will be released by Bright Sky Press this January.

Thistle Downe, the house, got its start 30 years ago, when Gary’s two children, now grown, began collecting troll dolls, those stiffly standing dolls with the wild hair and chimp-like faces. Gary, an architect, built the dolls a twig house so beautiful the family began using it as a decoration for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The children grew up and the toys went into storage, but the house proved memorable to many. When Molly met Gary, people kept asking her if she had seen “the troll house” yet. When Molly, a professional watercolorist and designer, did, she had two things to say: One, fairies lived in the house as well as trolls, and, two, no, it was not going to be put back into storage at the end of the holiday season.

The couple, who married in 2012, began adding to it. Electric lights. Stained-glass windows, hand-painted by Molly. A wrought-iron fence, made of bobby pins, by Gary, complete with a family crest on the gate. They added entirely new rooms and wings: a carriage house, to house a magical silver carriage, also built by Gary. The library. Guest quarters.

“This is what happens when two right-brained people get together without supervision,” said Molly.

Gary, who said he spends more time working on the house “than I’d ever admit to,” also said that working on it with Molly has been a wonderful way to start their new marriage together. The couple have devoted one of the rooms of their home to be a workshop for Thistle Downe projects. Thistle Downe has its own website: thistledownehouse.com.

Many of the materials for the house come right from Houston. The twigs the Whitneys use are from Hermann and Memorial parks. “People see us there, with our big garbage bags, and wave and thank us for cleaning up the park,” said Molly. “What we’re really doing is looking for the exact right kind of twigs we need.” All of the twigs come from the ground in the parks; they’ve never taken anything from a live tree.

Thistle Downe’s roof is shingled in the scales of pine cones. The pine cones are not local. “Everything is bigger in Texas, except pine cones,” Molly said, explaining that she has her family send her more appropriately sized ones from her native Alabama. A potted bush by one of the doors, however, is a dried magnolia fruit Molly spotted on the sidewalk in the neighborhood while walking Ruby. Gary made a clay pot for it. A dried flower they found during one of their park trips became the brush of a fairy’s broom. “Working on the house has really changed the way I look at things,” said Molly.

There is a troll in residence at Thistle Downe: the red-headed Tyson, the hero of the book. The 32 fairy figurines in the house are Christmas ornaments, based on the fairies created by the British illustrator and author Cicely Mary Barker, a favorite of Molly’s.

Much about Thistle Downe is personal to the Whitneys. For instance, they used a lace collar that once belonged to Molly’s great-great grandmother to make the canopy for a “fairy bed.” They also used that ancestor’s name, Amelia, for the fairy heroine of the book and set the story in the small town in the Orkney Islands of Scotland where the real Amelia lived. Another character in the book, Peter Leaf, is named after that town’s registrar, whom the Whitneys met there while researching her family tree.

“Working on all this has been nothing but a joy,” said Gary.

He and Molly are busily planning the next addition to the house.