It takes more than a hole in the wall to turn two small apartments into an elegant home.
But with the artistry of a creative painter, Barbie and Glenn Porcelain converted a dull walk-up in the Greenspring section of Baltimore into a classy showpiece.
The couple and their children, Tani, 12, Michael, 8, and Alex, 4, moved in August from New Rochelle, N.Y. Mr. Porcelain, 40, owned a corrugated box manufacturing business in New Jersey. He is working on a new venture here.
"We were looking for a more qualitative life," says Ms. Porcelain, 36, a Baltimore native. The Porcelains left behind a seven-bedroom, six-bathroom home. But the Orthodox Jewish family was unable to locate a comparable, yet affordable, home in an Orthodox neighborhood.
"I couldn't find a house with this much space that didn't require a lot of money and renovation," says Ms. Porcelain. "We're just not sure that the area warrants the price to achieve the look we want."
The family decided to postpone the big buy and rent at the Pickwick Apartments because it's near several Orthodox neighborhoods.
For $1,290 a month, the renovated 3,000-square-foot apartment offers four bedrooms and four baths, a combined living/dining area, family room and study, and two kitchens.
"Our rent for a month costs less than our taxes for a month on our New York home," Ms. Porcelain says.
The complex refurbished each kitchen with new counter tops, sinks, stoves and dishwashers to accommodate the family's observance of kosher dietary laws. Because meat and dairy products must be prepared separately, they designated one kitchen for meat and the other for dairy.
Before moving, they hired Baltimore painter Michael Bennett to transform the apartment's bare, white walls into works of art, giving him free rein to create.
"I told him I wasn't afraid of color or texture," Ms. Porcelain says. "What's the worst that could happen? He would repaint it white?"
Mr. Porcelain, though, was initially reluctant about investing Mr. Bennett's $3,000 fee in an apartment.
"But you couldn't get anything like this in New York for this price," he says. "It looks like real artwork."
In three weeks, Mr. Bennett gave the Porcelain home its character.
His most striking work is the living room's mint-green walls lined with 10 panels of emerald green inlays that could pass for modern art.
Walls in the formal dining room sport tone-on-tone strips of hunter green on the lower half, while the top is painted in blue-gray faux marble.
The family room's walls are painted in a bold pink with salmon overtones in huge argyle-shaped patterns, while two walls leading to the study are lined with bookcases.
The boys' room features a multi-dimensional wallpaper mural of a baseball game, while a basketball court is painted on the opposite wall.
Tani's room is painted in textured pink swirls with peach undertones.
Borders of hand-painted leaves trail into the entrance foyer, tying together the flowered wallpaper in both kitchens. As a surprise, Mr. Bennett did the fourth bathroom in an outhouse motif.
"I'm not looking at this as temporary," Ms. Porcelain says. "We're here, it's our home."