Page 86 - South Mississippi Living - March, 2021

HOME & GARDEN
THE GARDEN
story by Lynn Lofton photos by Katherine Sowers
An old barracks from Keesler Air Force Base doesn't sound like an ideal home, but Dianne and Donald del Cid of Ocean Springs have turned the circa 1930s building into a warm, inviting place to live. It was moved in three pieces to the property sometime after World War II, long before the del Cids purchased the home and property ve and a half years ago.
The home gives no hint of its former life even though it has all the original ooring and pocket doors and some of the wavy glass windows. “We opened up the ceiling and added the beams to make it feel more spacious,” Donald del Cid, an architect, said. “Someone before us added a deck on the back.”
There are lots of South facing windows on the rear of the home. “They overlook the garden and that's what sold us,” Dianne del Cid, a landscape architect, says. “The house was intact; we didn't have to do much. But we did lighten it up; everything was brown.”
She explains that anyone preserving a historical property is supposed to leave a 'witness.' “That's to show something of
its past. In the living room a faint outline on the oor shows where a built-in sofa sat and on the oor in the kitchen there's a dark outline of a closet because the kitchen was a bedroom before we changed it,” she said.
The airy living room has a nautical theme with a collection of sail boats displayed “because we're sailors,” Donald says.
The kitchen, which formerly was a bedroom, is on a di- agonal and has a view in all directions, including the sunny dining room.
86 | March 2021
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