Vintage homes shine in Healdsburg's Holiday Home Tour

The way floral designer Patty Bradley sees it, older homes are well-served with an old-world way of decorating for Christmas. That means simple garlands of evergreen and ornaments plucked from the winter landscape.

“I have an older home in downtown Sonoma,” said Bradley, who owns Paradise Flowers in Kentfield. “I decorate in the traditional, old-fashioned way. Very natural and very rustic. I do garlands of dried fruit on my tree. I use dried applies and lemons and oranges. I like things that are understated and not overdecorated. It’s very comforting to me.”

Bradley will be bringing that same look to an 1890s farmhouse that will be one of the highlights of the Dec. 6 Junior League of Napa/Sonoma’s Holiday Home Tour.

The roving annual event arrives in Healdsburg this year, and will feature three privately owned homes, including the Marshall House, once an old wreck of a mansion at 227 North St. dating back to the 1870s that Mark Goff and Phillip Engel have spent five years lovingly restoring, doing most of the work themselves in their spare time while holding down other jobs. Be prepared; they love holidays. Follow the good aromas to the kitchen, where Dustin Valette, the chef de cuisine of the Dry Creek Kitchen who is preparing to take over the current Zin Restaurant in Healdsburg, will have prepared hors d’oeuvres.

Tour-goers also will be invited to visit a 1922 Craftsman, owned by Sallie Weissinger. Tenant Pamela Volante, who built a career as an interior designer for high-end clients in Los Angeles, has added her own touches, from paint in period colors to a porch curtain that creates an indoor-outdoor space.

The Healdsburg Museum and the historic Grape Leaf Inn, a three-dormer Queen Anne built in 1900 that boasts a speakeasy downstairs, will also open their doors. All are within an easy stroll of one another, harkening back to an era when the holiday season was less about shopping and more about visiting with friends and family.

Each home will be done up for the season in a different way, offering ideas in action for seasonal decorating that don’t always require loading up the shopping cart.

Bradley, who is heading up a team decorating the Queen Anne-influenced home owned by Dr. Charlie Evans at 433 North St., will show off the simple, seasonal gifts of Mother Nature.

Since the mantel is usually the focal point in any vintage home, it is important that it look appropriately festive. Along the fireplace mantel will be cedar garlands with magnolia leaves and winter berries - tallow, pink pepper berries and blue privet - tucked in like tiny round ornaments of color.

You can easily customize your own mantel garland, Bradley said, with bits of nature of your own choosing. She likes to use dried hydrangeas, mosses and branches, as well as lichen and pine cones.

Bradley loves to use garlands and said they can be strung anywhere from around the front door to over interior doorways.

“I’ve even had people put them around an outdoor fireplace - basically anywhere you want to hang something,” she said.

Not to forget the kitchen, where today’s celebrants tend to gather, Bradley and her team will add a few notes of Christmas with lime-green cypress topiaries shaped like Christmas trees on the counters. For the island, an amaryllis plant and a simple bowl of pomegranates will add a natural, woodsy feeling, bringing in the outdoors at a time of year when people feel cooped up inside.

For Evans’ home, which was built in 1893, the design team will wrap the banisters in festive greenery, similarly tucking in natural elements. They will make their own wreath with berries, eucalyptus, hydrangeas and pomegranates. This is something most people, even those not inclined toward crafting, can do themselves, Bradley said.

You can buy a plain, pre-made evergreen wreath and, using wire or a glue gun, add berries, pine cones, eucalyptus, or anything else.

“It will be different than anything else you will see driving by and will be unique to your home. You can add ribbons and other things that coordinate with your own home,” she said.

She likes to warm up the doorway for seasonal guests with living plants. Visitors to Evans’ home will be greeted with a topiary in a decorative terra cotta pot surrounded by poinsettias and cyclamen. This is an old house but it has been updated for 21st-century living.

Evans, an emergency room physician, bought the property in 2002. He spent three years restoring and remodeling, expanding it from 1,600 to 2,600 square feet. It was a major undertaking that required a new foundation, roof, porch, plumbing and wiring. Whatever couldn’t be repaired was replaced as close to the original as possible, including siding and shingles.

The old-growth redwood from the original tank house, which supplied the earliest inhabitants with running water, was dismantled, re-planed and remade into moldings, corbels and a picket fence.