HISTORY BUFFED

In Portland, Oregon, an artistic family turns to Jessica Helgerson to help make an old house feel fresh

- KATHRYN O'SHEA-EVANS

It's probably rare for a Grammy Award nominee to fix their own toilet. But for James Mercer, the singer-songwriter behind indie rock band The Shins, the powder room's original hightank toilet in question was-if not worthy of a ballad-certainly worth saving, because it was perfectly in keeping with the rambling Portland, Oregon, Victorian he shares with his wife, garden designer Marisa Kula Mercer, and their three children. Previous owners had stripped its wooden surface, afflicting it with a Reagan-era golden oak hue and unsightly screws, and "James beautifully refinished it," says the couple's friend and designer, Jessica Helgerson. "It glows."

Glowing, too: the entire 1890 home, having recently emerged from an incremental remodel that spanned 12 years, during which the Mercers brought in Helgerson and her firm to help them reimagine their home while remaining tonally true to the Queen Anne style. "We didn't do the whole thing where you buy a place and then just basically gut it," James notes, adding that the house's original elements were what charmed them into buying it in the first place: "I love even the nicks and scratches." The existing homestead presides over

nearly an acre, a former hazelnut orchard with 300-year-old Douglas fir trees. It's an idyllic plot for Marisa's layered, Anglophilic gardens (she has studied at Great Dixter House & Gardens in East Sussex, England; mountain fleece, spotted joe-pye weed, and Culver's root are exultant on the grounds).