Moving Fauxforward - Claire Blome

Piver and her husband Andy Vick eat most oftheir meals at the kitchen table, which Pivercreated out of a wood sculpture base, a layer ofSuper Balls and a glass top. Riotous colors in theliving areas, opposite, include pink desks underthe hanging Bubble Chair (which serve as astepping stool to the lofty perch), a reupholsteredhospital stretcher nestled into a corner belowa hanging rug, and Piver’s LED light sculpture,flickering on the wall of the TV lounge.A jewelry class Piver took in 1991 at the Torpedo FactoryArt Center in Alexandria, Va., redirected their careers.By 1993, she had started a jewelry business, and Vick wassupporting her full-time in production, administration andaccounting. Based in Fairfax, Va., at the time, the coupletraveled the country doing craft shows.On a windy November afternoon, a lean and unassumingPiver sits on a black-and-white faux fur cushion in aBubble Chair that hangs from the living room’s 14-footceiling. She faces bright-orange couches framed by a limegreenwall. Below and behind her are shockingly pinkfur-lined walls. Vick reclines on a reupholstered pink zebraprintlounger. The sunny space is at once overwhelming andcomfortable—after a while, the fantastic colors and designsbecome the new “normal.”“In here, I decided to do everything I could in pink. Idon’t know why,” Piver explains. The faux fur is “so easy,so much quicker than painting a wall,” andwarmer, too. “No animals were killed inthe making of it,” Vick jokes.Piver’s first fur experiment was on theguest bathroom’s ceiling. That led to lightblue fur on cabinets below the bookshelvesdownstairs. When the couple agreed to movethe bedroom from a noisy open space at theback wall to a quieter enclosed room threeyears ago, fur seemed like the obvious choiceto adorn the walls. “When we did the bedroom,I decided to cover it in fur, and morefur started happening elsewhere,” she says.Cumberland is about a two-hour drivefrom Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington,D.C. Located in the mountains of WesternMaryland, the former railroad hub hasnow begun attracting artists with its historicbuildings and picturesque surroundings.“We like the feel of Cumberland,” says Vick.“It has the nestled-in-the-mountains, red-brick aesthetic.”Piver and Vick decided on the town only after extensivetravel. When the deal fell through on their first choice, abright-fuchsia printing-press building, they took anotherlook at a turn-of-the-century three-story building andpurchased the top two floors in 1998.The couple bought the space from an architect, whosecontribution was the large cutout between the floors, openingPiver’s second-story studio space to the light that poursin through the third-story windows.The move to Cumberland signaled another change.The couple fully anticipated they’d be doing craft shows“forever and ever,” Piver says, but after a decade, the marketchanged and Vick found himself increasingly volunteeringin the community.That work eventually led to a full-time position as theexecutive director of the Allegany Arts Council in 2003.56 AMERICANSTYLE • April 2009