photo by Brent Fleuryby Jess McCuan      .     photos by Brent Fleury

Elynn Bernstein thinks of it as her New York loft in a vinyl box. Only the box—a 1,300-square-foot space in which nearly every inch is painted in bright colors and decorated with art objects she’s collected over the years—happens to be surrounded by 42 pristine, partially wooded acres ten miles outside of Hendersonville. The “vinyl box,” barn and grounds, once the site of a commercial nursery, is also home to three cats, four goats, 11 chickens, three sheep, four parrots, seven geese, two crested ducks and a partridge in a pear tree. Okay, so the partridge is actually an “attack turkey” named Martin who struts protectively around the property. But there’s something positively fairy tale-like about Bernstein’s home, named the Elfin Woods—a naturalist’s term for small trees that grow miraculously in poor soil above the tree line. The sight of geese and sheep ambling about on such picturesque high-mountain acreage makes you want to fling your arms open and reenact a scene from The Sound of Music. Though she lives at Elfin Woods with her partner Ron Schweitz, the vision for such a whimsical place came mostly from Bernstein, a 56-year-old painter and fiber artist who grew up near New York City and whose artwork, like her home, can be a bit surreal.

Bernstein has always been artistic. She was “the fringe person” in her family, she says, noting that her parents have been consistently supportive of her art. After majoring in art at Syracuse University, she worked for a time as a nurse in Manhattan. Then she moved with her now ex-husband to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she spent 13 years painting full time, eventually showing her dreamlike, abstract paintings at galleries in Charlotte and Atlanta. Not long after she moved to Hendersonville in 2001, she took up felting as well, and now she spends long hours in her studio rolling felt and dyeing silks and yarns, creating intricate wraps and shawls that can seem as complex and artful as any painting.

Her transition to the South has been trying at times. For one, she never found a decent bagel shop in Charlotte (there aren’t any in Hendersonville either), and she wishes someone would open an Indian restaurant in Hendersonville. But when she gets an indomitable hankering for great bagels or vegetable vindaloo, usually about every three months, she hops a flight back to New York City where her mother and sister still live.

In the meantime, Bernstein, who was never a huge fan of crowded subways, says she does not take for granted what Hendersonville offers her—space, freedom and the ability to let her imagination run wild. After the commercial nursery shut down, the property that is now Elfin Woods became quite dilapidated, so she and Schweitz spent the first year commuting from Charlotte, cleaning the place up slowly as they crafted plans to remake it.

Bernstein considers her four parrots—Lilly, Betty, Curtis and Garth—her friends, and she talks to them constantly. The birds speak and do tricks, squawking out phrases like “Elynn!” and “How are you?” and “You going out for dinner?” throughout the day. In the rectangular vinyl building where they now live, Schweitz and Bernstein built an enormous glass birdcage and several parrot perches. While the rooms have a sophisticated, museum-like quality—with spotlights on various sculptures, paintings and mobiles—some architectural elements, like floor-to-ceiling closets in the front room, look like giant bird houses. “Half the people who come in here don’t know what to make of it,” says Schweitz, who grew up in Nebraska and admits some of his relatives are among the more bewildered guests. “Other people are amazed at all the little details.”

Bernstein has been a painter for years, but recently she’s taken up felting, spending hours in her studio dyeing wools and silks to make intricate, artful scarves and shawls.The downturn has put a damper on Bernstein’s dream of expanding her sanctuary. She has been in talks with Madison Avenue clothing stores about selling her shawls and scarves, and Schweitz is employed full time as a home builder. But sadly, the couple has started selling some of the animals at Elfin Woods because it simply costs too much to feed them. They never intended to use the animals for milk or meat. At first, they thought Elfin Woods could be a petting zoo, until their attorneys advised against it.

But even after the petting zoo idea fell apart, Bernstein wanted to keep as many animals as she could. She has loved farm animals all her life, starting at age six with a duck named Sonny. Later, she caused something of a stir leading her pet ducks and goats around the streets of downtown Charlotte. Her current plan is to cross her fingers and hope the economy pulls out of its slump. She also hopes to spark some interest in her shawls, if not on Madison Avenue then perhaps somewhere in Western North Carolina. In the meantime, she does feel buoyed just looking out at the clouds from her mountaintop “loft,” which is filled with happy chattering parrots and hundreds, if not thousands, of intriguing pieces of art—in theory, enough to lift anyone’s spirits. 

To learn more about Elynn Bernstein’s paintings and shawls, email Elynn at elfinwood@msn.com.