This Florida House Sold for One Dollar in 2005. Look at It Now

Even before the artist and gallery owner Sarah Soule Webb found a new muse in her 1908 American Foursquare in Pensacola, Florida, the house had quite the personality. Or as Webb puts it, “She’s a salty old bitch that’s been around the block.” She means this last part literally.

By the time Webb purchased the home in 2020, the structure had sat on three different lots within Sanders Beach, an old fishing neighborhood just southwest of downtown. A little more than a decade after it was built on a snug parcel on the bay, its next owners hoisted the house onto pine logs, and oxen pulled it to the north end of the block, where its joints settled and it enjoyed an ever-so-slightly new view for the next eighty years. Then, in 2005, a couple bought the home for just one dollar—a price indicative of the incessant humidity that had seeped into the wood and recent damage from Hurricane Ivan. They moved it a few doors down, to their own lot, coincidentally across the street from the house’s original address, this time helped by twenty-first-century machinery, and stabilized the bones.

When Webb—freshly returned to her hometown after years in Birmingham, Alabama—got her hands on it, the structure remained in good enough shape that she could take her time, sitting with the existing design while letting the house tell her what it wanted. And the house, as it turned out, wouldn’t shut up.

She decided to paint the red-brown exterior a minty green, for instance, and the building let her know it would very much like that: After stripping away the top layers of paint, “we found that soft green was the original color of the house,” Webb says. Another bit of kismet: While searching for decor at her favorite local antique mall, she spotted three wooden fish that she herself had painted when she was fourteen; she decided they, to, deserved a homecoming.

As the pieces fell into place, Webb brought in thrifted finds so distinctive that she had no choice but to let them speak as well. In the dining room, yellow chairs with faux-bamboo lattice backs and floral valances she found on Facebook Marketplace complement the wonky windows symptomatic of a long-loved home, and they in turn dictated the style of the floor-to-ceiling mural Webb painted on the turquoise walls, complete with great egrets and live oaks draped with Spanish moss. “I knew I wanted to go Old Florida with it,” Webb says. “I love when children walk in and gasp. That’s my favorite reaction.”

The other rooms, built around carefully chosen antiques, tell tales of their own. There’s the pool table at the center of the game room; it once sat in a Texas firehouse turned bar that Bonnie and Clyde frequented. Rotary phones are scattered in nearly every room, holding echoes of conversations past. In the kitchen, Webb left the quartersawn oak cabinets the previous owners built to look period accurate, but lined the walls with emerald tile, mimicking the color of five fish plates she hung above the doorway—plates made by Webb’s brother-in-law’s grandma nearly a century ago, when she was sent to the coast for “hysteria.” “In a world where everything’s an open floor plan, in this home, walls are magical,” Webb says. “Each room has its own little story, and you can walk from one room to another and take it all in. It’s all very cohesive, and it works, but each one gets to have its own playful nature.”

To further the Old Florida vibe, Webb brought the outside in—flamingo ornaments adorn branches in an antique vase, collected shells crowd side tables, and carnivorous plants sprout in the kitchen window. She also took the inside out. The home’s most memorable detail is arguably the porch bathtub, an enamel shape-shifter hidden from the street by palm fronds and hanging flower baskets. The tub has followed Webb through the seasons of her adult life: She found it in the basement of her former home and used it as a beer cooler for parties. Later it made a wonderful baby bath. Now it stands ready to wash off sandy feet or welcome an ice bather on a scorching afternoon.

In this home, adored by families for more than a century, no detail is perfect—note the warped windows, the worn wood floors—which to Webb means everything fits just right. “I grew up with a very playful, relaxed childhood on the bay, and I feel like this home embodies that spirit,” she says. “You can’t be a perfectionist and own an old home. It’s the imperfection that makes it beautiful to me.”