by Jess McCuan     .     photos by Matt Rose

Adrienne van Dooren joined the army at 20, made captain at 26 and served two six-month stints as a White House aide under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. After the military, she became a faux finisher. Her book, The House That Faux Built, below, has sold 15,000 copies.Quiet people who want to learn to speak up usually have a variety of options. Assertiveness training, for example. Or a class or two in public speaking. But when Adrienne van Dooren was 20, she thought joining the United States Army would do the trick. (Her mother begged to differ. “There are only two kinds of women who join the army,” van Dooren recalls her mother saying, and neither one was a compliment.) Growing up in Hendersonville, van Dooren, now 49, was something of a tomboy, playing outside and roaming the woods with her brother. She was also petite and pretty with fair hair and skin, a well-mannered, soft-spoken Southern belle. After two years at Montreat College, she went to a job interview where the interviewer told her she needed to learn to be more assertive. So when she enrolled at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, she took classes in education and fine arts, but also, surprisingly, its ROTC program. 

In ROTC, she learned, among other things, how to handle a rifle and rappel out of a helicopter. The program was challenging and glamorous, a confidence-booster that beat a speech class by a mile. After she joined the army full time, the assertiveness training kicked into high gear when she found herself in charge of 40-year-old male sergeants and $1 million worth of equipment. Still, even after twenty years as a military intelligence officer, which required her to keep her long red hair tucked up under hats and helmets, van Dooren’s artsy, feminine self was alive and kicking. By the time she left the service in 2001, she was more than ready to lay down her helmet and pick up a paintbrush. 

Van Dooren entered the army just as women started playing more prominent roles in the military. In 1978, the year before van Dooren started ROTC, the government finally shut down the Women’s Army Corps, the “women’s branch” of the military, created in 1942 as a way for some 150,000 women to serve in World War II. (Before then, only female nurses were grouped with the rest of the military.) In the ‘70s, there were a lot of “firsts”— in 1970, Elizabeth Hoisington was the first woman to attain a brigadier general rank in the army (though she retired the next year), and by 1978, Margaret Brewer achieved that same rank in the Marine Corps. Despite this progress, van Dooren says no one believed there would ever be a female four-star general, mainly because women weren’t allowed in or near combat situations until 1994. (Coincidentally, in November 2008, the army named its first four-star woman general, Ann Dunwoody.) But for the most part, in van Dooren’s early career, the army was a man’s world. And van Dooren, who was once groped by a boss, often tried to prove that she was tough. Once, at a training camp, she demonstrated her hardiness—her “hoowah,” as she says—by biting the head off of a live chicken. 

During this period, as she tested her mettle and charted a career path, she came to several forks in the road. At first, she wanted training but thought she might remain in the reserves, a much less significant time and energy commitment than active duty. Then, she wanted to be a Jane Bond, doing “spooky spy stuff,” but changed her mind after six months at the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Officer's Basic Course in Fort Huachuca in southeast Arizona. Finally, she chose strategic intelligence, which made use of her smarts and let her formulate plans for whole countries rather than staking out single foxholes. 

One thing was certain—she loved the travel. An early assignment took her to the small town of Rheinberg, Germany, where a family adopted 23-year-old “Little Orphan Adrienne.” Van Dooren has gone back to visit every Christmas for the past 28 years. 

She made captain at 26, got a master’s degree in strategic intelligence and flew to posts in Turkey, Panama, Korea and Honduras. None of this left much time to look for a husband, and by this time van Dooren’s mother fully blamed her lack of grandchildren on the United States Army. Though van Dooren didn’t join the military to find a husband, she did believe there was a chance she could meet her mate there, considering she was surrounded by men. She quickly realized most army men were unavailable to her—either already married or, for protocol reasons, a rank that she couldn’t date. “It was like—water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” she says. At 34, van Dooren was briefly engaged to a man while teaching leadership courses at Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, but the relationship fell apart. 

More importantly, in Kansas, she started keeping a journal and cooking. And her meals were far from standard-issue army fare. Once a week at Fort Leavenworth, she brought her class cakes decorated with realistic-looking sugar flowers she created herself. For special-occasion officer meals, she would carve up a sweet potato in the shape of a rose or cut and score a cheese ball to look like a perfect pineapple. After a year or two in Kansas, at another career fork in the road, she was offered an intelligence assignment in Korea that would put her on a path toward becoming a general. Or, she could stay stateside, continue her teaching and cultivate her creativity. 

She chose the creative route. In fact, after the initial years trying to prove herself, she realized the military made her feel like “a round peg in a square hole.” After stints as a White House aide under both presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, van Dooren took a post running the ROTC program at Cal State Fullerton in Fullerton, California. In both Kansas and California, she took chances running creativity and critical thinking classes, which she initially disguised under the term “innovation.” She had learned that, while she enjoyed many aspects of the military, “creativity was a bad word.”

As she neared her 20th year in the army, her biggest challenge was to think of something truly creative to do when she got out. The Veterans Affairs Department pays for some retraining classes for military retirees, and van Dooren, living in Virginia at the time, seriously considered becoming a chef. Then, a neighbor introduced her to faux. Faux finishing is a kind of decorative painting in which finishers use paints and plasters on a home’s surfaces to mimic expensive materials like wood, marble and even rugs. With a little paint and a stencil, a good faux finisher can make it appear that your walls are covered in, say, an antique brocade fabric or expensive Venetian tile.  

Once she decided to “go faux,” van Dooren approached her second career with characteristic fervor. After several months of training she rounded up five friends in 2005 to buy a three-bedroom house in Arlington that they would transform into a “faux” show house. All proceeds from the show house project—which ended up involving some 30 faux finishers and dozens of other artists, architects and photographers—would go toward financing a Habitat for Humanity home for Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Van Dooren spent between six and eight months corralling artists to help her transform an unremarkable brick fixer-upper into an ornate home with floors of faux textured stone, intricate wall and ceiling murals, and a basement wine cellar and tasting room that van Dooren painted herself (and won a Fauxcademy award for). 

Van Dooren turned the house project into a book, The House That Faux Built, in 2007, and it’s sold 15,000 copies. In the meantime she’s started doing faux finishing in people’s homes, and an average job usually runs about $3,500, depending on the work and number of rooms involved. While she admits she occasionally gets fed up with a fussy client, she also generally loves faux finishing and believes it’s a way to help people brighten up their rooms for less money. “I like to tell people—it’s like giving your house a makeover without major surgery,” she says. (For even more cost savings, many faux-finishing techniques are easy to learn yourself).  

These days, at her home in Montford, it’s not unusual to find this former military captain tuned to HGTV, shouting at the television set. She’s working on a TV pilot herself based on faux finishing, a series she’d like to call “Drab to Fab to Sold.” She’s also working on a DVD of faux-finishing techniques, taking on more portrait clients and generally relishing in her retirement. “I love having the freedom of deciding what to do with my days,” she says. 

Her current gig as an artist and creative type may seem like a total about-face from her army officer self. But van Dooren says her military training comes in handy often. Negotiating with all those artists and photographers on The House That Faux Built was like “herding cats,” she says. “It was the hardest thing I’ve done in or out of the army.” (To keep things under control, she appointed “room captains” to coordinate all the decor in each space.) She says her mother, always a skeptic, finally acknowledges that the military was a good place for her daughter to learn useful life skills. Van Dooren spent hours standing at the mirror practicing giving orders, and her ability to speak forcefully when necessary has always served her well. One day in a water-aerobics class at the Asheville YMCA, the class instructor didn’t show up, and van Dooren volunteered to lead. Though she wouldn’t have been so bold before the military, she found herself completely at ease standing up in front, even surprising some of her classmates when she switched into officer mode and bellowed out the instructions. “I wasn’t a natural leader before the army,” she says. “Now that it’s over, I’m a bit more comfortable in my own skin.”  

 For more information about van Dooren’s faux finishing, visit www.fauxhouse.com.