About Kate Holmes
This we know: home is where the heart is. Our home celebrates life and love. It is the place that centers and affirms family. Home reflects our personal values in the things we choose to surround ourselves with.
Creating a "home" speaks to the intersection of passion and design. Kate's passion has always been a love of animals and nature. No doubt a result of having been raised in a beautiful, rural spot - just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the woods, streams and fields as her playground, and horses and chickens and goats at her fingertips. Climbing trees, frolicking at sunset with fireflies. All seasons were fair game: in winter, kate's mother taught her to ice skate on the thick ice of outdoor ponds, and they sledded and skiied, ever embracing the snowy cold. Her summers were spent in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in the era where children were swooshed out the door early in the morning and encouraged to stay out and play til sunset. The sea breeze wafting off the Nantucket Sound accompanied daily adventures of sailing, swimming, digging for clams, and riding bikes willy-nilly. On long, rainy days Kate and her friends would play cards and build magnificent card houses. Her grandmother's old Cape Cod clapboard house embraced the tranquil feel of summer leisure, of simple summer joys.
Kate's connection to nature in early life carried over into her studies at Brown University. This is when she began to paint in earnest, and her imagery of animals, sea and boats sprang to life. Upon graduation in 1986, she moved to England, living in London, and in the Cotswolds, soaking in that vast beauty - rolling green hills, quaint villages, a herd of sheep often known to block a road. Later, during an extended soujourn in Los Angeles, she married and started a family. She eventually moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her husband and children - pursuing a more "back to basics" lifestyle in the colonial mountain pueblo.
Kate places tremendous value on creating a beautiful home. The home really does celebrate and affirm family and life, no matter where one lives. This is kate's belief and her art and decor pursue the idea of bringing into the home the sense of joy and beauty and calm that are so readiy available in the natural world and its creatures.