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95 BY REBECCA SHERMAN. ART DIRECTION MICHELLE AVIÑA. PHOTOGRAPHY LISA PETROLE. O ne of Salle Werner- Va u g h n 's m o s t cherished memories as a child growing up in rural East Texas is lying on her back in a field of yellow buttercups and pink evening primroses, looking up at the blue sky. The artist, now 80, recreated that memory on canvas several decades ago: an atmospheric abstraction of sky and flowers awash in pastel hues. Her paintings feel otherworldly, often done in the 18th-century confectionary colors of Boucher and Fragonard. "My work is about a world we know exists but can't really see," she says. That painting inspired an ongoing art-and-interiors installation created by Werner-Vaughn inside this Victorian- era cottage, which she completed three years ago. It's one of four cottages on Blossom Street in Magnolia Grove in Houston that the artist has saved and restored, each used like a stage set for displaying her paintings, sculpture, and antique furnishings. She has dubbed the compound of cottages Harmonium. "I'm trying to create a place of harmony and beauty in a world that is stricken," she says. This cottage, which she named Here & There, is surrounded by lovely unkempt gardens, wild with climbing passion vines and morning glories. "They are old-fashioned flowers, the kind that were here when these houses were built," Werner-Vaughn says. The vines wind through a tangle of shrubs and old trees, including pine, pecan, kumquat, and fig. Like all of the cottages that belong to the artist, Here & There was once part of a long-neglected enclave of rail workers' houses that were destined for the wrecking ball until she began salvaging them 31 years ago. The neighborhood was established in the 1880s, mostly by German immigrants working on the construction of a new railroad running through Texas to the port of Galveston. To compensate for seasonal hurricanes, DREAMSCAPE FOR ARTIST SALLE WERNER-VAUGHN, INTERIORS ARE PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS. HER ART- AND ANTIQUES-FILLED COTTAGES ON BLOSSOM STREET ARTICULATE THE UNSEEN — A BUNGALOW CAN BECOME A PALACE, IF YOU IMAGINE IT. many of the houses were built with ingenious wood balloon frames, which could be easily re-erected using a block- and-tackle pulley system. Other houses were ordered out of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, shipped by train, and assembled on-site. Werner-Vaughn first discovered the neighborhood when she was looking for an inexpensive studio space where she could work. The area was badly run- down, and the houses were "in dreadful shape," she remembers. She bought her first cottage in 1989. Saving old houses In a bath that looks more like an entrance hall, are antique bronze doors from a bank, salvaged columns, and a bronze basin. Paintings by Salle Werner-Vaughn.