By Jill Morenz
The Catalytic Fund
To the owner of the cottage in this week’s episode, its Dayton neighborhood feels a lot like Brooklyn—walkable and friendly with an urban flair. It also offered her a blank slate when it came to the house and yard. By combining a unified color palette with handmade furniture and quirky collections, she has created a welcoming, personalized home in a thriving garden setting, as well as growing a new side business for herself.
The cottage (Photos provided)
Susan Beresford is a textile designer by trade and is inspired by the organic forms and colors of flowers and plants. When she turned her designer’s eye to her yard, she took advantage of the fertile Kentucky soil and wound up with a bountiful harvest of tomatoes, peppers and onions. She used some of this produce to experiment with different Bloody Mary mix recipes. When her friends gathered for brunch in her backyard, they loved her concoctions as much as the lush setting. She called her new business “Farm to Hangover.”
Needing more room to grow, Susan is now leasing a vacant lot from the City of Dayton, which she has turned into an urban farm. She looks forward to a large harvest and many more jars of flavorful Bloody Mary mixes.
With her pretty house, flourishing gardens and cute neighborhood, this New York transplant has been able to grow and blossom in Northern Kentucky.
A new episode of Beyond the Curb: River City Living is released every Friday. Previous episodes can be watched here.
The Catalytic Fund is the private sector, not-for-profit organization providing financing assistance and related services for developers of quality residential and commercial real estate projects in Northern Kentucky’s urban cities of Ludlow, Covington, Newport, Bellevue and Dayton. Its mission is to accelerate Northern Kentucky’s urban renaissance through targeted investments in catalytic real estate development projects in urban neighborhoods.
