Hillsboro home, known as Peace House, is their canvas

When two artists collaborate with each other and Mother Nature to create a home and refuge on 17 acres where their lives, work and passions come together, artistry and imagination abound. For the husband-and-wife team of Jerry C. and Lea Ann Williams, their off-the-beaten path abode in Hillsboro is an ever-changing canvas and a shared comfort.

They call their home Peace House and gladly shout its name from its rooftop in colorful letters 5 feet high. “We put up the letters in 2020 prior to the election when there was so much division in the country,” Lea Ann says. The letters have stayed up ever since.

The story of Peace House is one of twists and turns, starting in the 1990s when Jerry’s parents acquired the property. “I couldn’t have done any of this without my mom and dad. They bought the land with the intention of building on it,” Williams says.

As a single father with three children, Jerry had planned to live on their property in a mobile home, but fate stepped in. His parents found another spot, on a lake, and built a home there, so Jerry decided to try his hand at building a home on their 17-acre spot. He’d never built anything before. “I had a lot of favors to call in, though,” he says. “We started building in 1990, and I finished the first house in 1993.”

“All his buddies showed up. One knew how to frame, one of them knew how to do this, and another knew how to do that and they all pulled together because they knew Jerry was raising his three kids on his own,” Lea Ann says.

Although Lea Ann wouldn’t come into the Jerry’s life until 2009, after the building was completed, she is the keeper of their family stories, touts their art works on social media and researches family genealogy. In 2013, when Lea Ann and Jerry married, his parents deeded them the 17 acres where Peace House stands, another piece of family history she’ll document.

“The original mobile home sits in front of the first house where I raised the kids. Later I put a big addition at the back of it just about two inches away,” Jerry says.

Today, the colorful compound sits in harmony on the land, along with a hand-painted waxed canvas teepee Jerry built.

“I spent a couple of years painting it. My grandkids helped,” he says. The teepee is a symbol of the indigenous peoples whose love of the earth informs the couple’s care for their land. The grandkids love it.

Jerry and Lea Ann live and work in the front house, which consists of two open plan levels and a series of porches. There aren’t specific rooms but they’ve defined areas by use.

Their studios fill the lower level of their home with tools, tables, easels, a kiln and supplies for painting, sewing and sculpting. They both spend time making pieces for the Green Door Gallery, where they are both resident artists. They also enter shows, and donate art to causes dear to their hearts.

They cook, relax, gather and sleep on the main floor. The flow of the open plan allows for friends to spread out for parties and celebrations. The porches also provide great spaces for conversation.

They’ve filled every available surface with their art plus works of fellow artists and from students from Jefferson College where Jerry was a fixture in the ceramics studio until it closed.

An unusual sculptural accent, their shiny motorcycle, sits on the main floor ready to be wheeled out for a ride, an activity they both enjoy.

The interior paint scheme includes Jerry’s mural of Crazy Horse and a buffalo herd on the move and uses their favorite shades of blues and whites with pops of orange. Walls aren’t roller painted one color, but brush painted from light washes to deepest shades.

So far, Jerry and Lea Ann have used 14 different colors on the polychromatic house. They’ve used 42 gallons of paint, mostly custom colors, like the blue they had mixed to match a morning glory in their garden, or the river shoe green color they matched from Lea Ann’s actual river shoes.

The colorful house doesn’t blend into the wooded setting but stands as a symbol of surviving life’s trials to live with joy and goodwill. Making art in all aspects of life helps them both thrive in the face of life’s challenges.

Peace didn’t just happen in Hillsboro for them. They created it. “We treat our land as a real spiritual place. Nobody drives four wheelers on it, and we don’t let anyone hunt here,” Jerry says.

Lea Ann speaks to the creator every morning from their porch and sings to her woodland friends. “A Native American friend of mine turned me on to the Cherokee Good Morning song. I sing it in Cherokee. The deer got used to my singing and come to greet me, heads up, and I feed them,” she says. “One of our does we call Bobtail got her tail shot off her first year, brought her new twins out to meet me a few months back, and that was something really special,” she says.