The Artist Behind Blueberry

Some houses begin with a blueprint. Blueberry began with imagination.

To understand why Blueberry Brook looks the way it does today, you have to know a little about one of the people who helped shape it: Ginny Palusky.

Blueberry’s story began when Ginny’s father, Brooke Kottmann, purchased the property and the two began imagining a bed and breakfast of their own. Brooke was a home remodeler from Maryland. Ginny was an artist. Somewhere between those two ways of seeing the world—one rooted in building and the other in creating—Blueberry began to take shape. The property’s own history says the father and daughter sketched their ideas together at Simeon’s before spending years bringing the house to life.

And perhaps that combination explains why Blueberry has never felt like a house designed according to one particular style.

Walk through the Farmhouse today and you'll find rooms that don't necessarily look like they were designed to match one another. Colors change. Furniture changes. Periods change. A piece that feels European might sit only a few rooms away from something completely different. Doors, artwork, carved furniture, books, glass, textiles, and architectural details all seem to have found their own places.

That's part of the point.

Ginny didn't approach Blueberry simply as a building that needed to be furnished. She approached it as an artist.

One of the best examples is the collection of forty doors her father brought to the property. Rather than seeing a pile of mismatched building materials, Ginny saw possibilities, finding ways to incorporate the doors throughout the house.

Her husband, Bob Palusky, brought another artistic discipline to Blueberry. An accomplished glassblower, Bob added his own craftsmanship to a property where art wasn't something chosen at the end to decorate finished rooms—it became part of how the place itself was made.

Creating Blueberry became something of a family and community undertaking. Ginny involved her children and local young people in the transformation, teaching different trades along the way. And this wasn't a quick renovation intended to get a property open as quickly as possible.

The house took seven years to complete.

Seven years gave Blueberry time to evolve—to change with new ideas, incorporate unexpected finds, save things worth keeping, and allow one person's craftsmanship to meet another person's imagination.

That slow evolution is still visible today. There isn't one perfectly coordinated furniture collection or a single aesthetic explaining everything you see. Instead, there are layers: different hands, eras, objects, and ideas have all left something behind.

‍

That's part of what makes walking through the Farmhouse interesting. You notice the room first, then the furniture. Maybe it's a painting, a carved detail, an old book, or one of those doors you hadn't paid attention to before.

The longer you look, the more there is to find.

Blueberry has continued to change since Ginny and Bob's time here, but their influence hasn't disappeared. The property will keep evolving, too. Rooms will change, things will move, new pieces will find their way in, and old ones will need care. Preserving Blueberry doesn't mean freezing it exactly as it was.

It means continuing the creative instinct that shaped it in the first place: seeing possibility in unusual things, allowing objects to have character, and understanding that everything doesn't have to perfectly match to belong together.

Because Blueberry was never created to look like everywhere else.

And that's something worth preserving.

‍

‍