How a Sears kit house in Moss Landing became an arts hub -- and a work of art in and of itself.

This story is excerpted from a story that was originally published in the Weekly on Nov. 22, 2018.

Step into the wayback machine for a minute, back to 1952.

In the census-designated place known as Moss Landing, where even today just over 200 people live, Dorothy and Bill Carnie moved to Pieri Court, buying a 1925 Sears kit house that had once served as a caretaker’s residence down the road at the Standard Oil operation. There were no other houses on the block back then – the house was moved from its original location at what is now Haute Enchilada Cafe – and you could see the ocean from the yard. In the back of the property, in the enormous garage, the Carnies ran the Castroville Times newspaper, with Bill as publisher and Dorothy as the linotype operator, laying out lines of hot metal type and printing each edition.

Dorothy used a $5,000 inheritance from her mother to buy the Pieri Court property, and that was a good thing, because, as her niece Nancy Russell puts it, “they were bad at selling ads.” They never made much money off of the paper, but they were about the only publication at the time to run stories about the nascent farm labor movement, Cesar Chavez and opinion pieces opposing war.

The trip to the wayback is important because it’s how we make our way to Russell. She had only met her Aunt Dorothy, her father’s sister, a few times in her life, but she knew Dorothy had the reputation of running an open house and helping out people who needed it. And in 1984, Russell – having just gone through a divorce and trying to figure out what to do next – needed it.

“She welcomed me,” Russell says. “I had been a professional person, a director of nonprofits, and when I moved here I started out selling hot dogs at the Crosby [golf tournament]. I was trying to start over.”

In 1991, wanderlust struck, and Russell went to Nepal, first as a volunteer then as an employee of an NGO directing a family planning program. She went to Africa and Asia continuing that work.

In 2011, she decided to come back to the U.S., specifically back to the Pieri Court house, which she inherited when her aunt died in 2004. It was time to put down roots. “I wanted to know my neighbors for the rest of my life,” she says. “I was 64 and I tried to find work, but I was not successful and I realized I really wanted to be an artist.

“A friend advised me to stop calling the garage a garage and instead call it a studio and pick up a brush every day,” she says. “I painted furniture, I painted any object I could find. One day, I painted the front door.”

She waited for the neighbors – by then, where empty fields once stood was an entire neighborhood – to respond. But nobody said anything. That’s when her entire house, inside and out, became a canvas.

An enormous wood dragon, festooned with paint and small mirrors, runs almost the length of the driveway. The driveway itself is painted in a mural, with colorful figures, fauna and flora. A flock of pink flamingos stick out of a camellia bush (“I hate that camellia bush,” Russell says, “but I didn’t want to rip it out so I decorated it”). The kitchen floor linoleum is red with blue flowers, painted, Russell says, because she couldn’t afford to put down something new. Even the refrigerator is a work of art.

There’s so much to look at, it’s hard to know where to start. But people do look: The Boys and Girls Club has visited. A boy walking down the street once commented, “On a scale of 1 to 10, this place is an 11.” Someone else once said, “I bet you can never be sad here.”