Curated by Local Artists: filling a Gulf Coast cottage

Some houses are meant to be shown off, and some are meant to be collected into. 1620 2nd Street on Gulfport's 2nd Street is the second kind: a turn-of-the-century shotgun cottage whose red walls, gallery-like hallway, and warm heart pine floors were clearly put together by people who love the way a room can tell a story. We call it curated by local artists, because that is genuinely how the house feels, and because the block around it sits right in the middle of a Coast that has always made things by hand. It is a place that asks you to live among the work of your neighbors, and this autumn it is heading to HGTV.

What does a cottage curated by local artists look like?

It looks like color used with confidence. The living room walls are a warm tomato red, the kind of choice a person makes when they understand that a shotgun cottage can carry color a bigger house never could. Walk from room to room and the heart pine floors keep everything grounded while the ceilings stay high and airy, so nothing ever feels heavy. The corner fireplace anchors the living room like a signature, its mantel a changing display of the small objects people gather when they live slowly.

The hallway between the rooms is the easiest place to see the artist's hand. Wall shelving, a mirror, frames rearranged as the light moved through the day: it reads less like a passage and more like a quiet gallery installed by someone with a good eye. Original transoms above the doors let daylight drift from room to room, so every piece on those walls gets its turn in the sun. The cottage was renovated by Carl Padgett in the 1980s and updated again in 2006, but the work always respected what was there: heart pine kept, ceilings kept, and the clean shotgun sightline from the front door straight through to the back never interrupted.

Gulfport's art scene, right outside the door

This cottage is not decorated in a vacuum. Downtown Gulfport has one of the sweetest little art communities on the Coast, and it is an easy walk from the front porch. The Gulfport Arts Center lives in the restored historic Carnegie Library on 24th Avenue and shows the work of roughly forty local and coastal makers: pottery, textiles, painting, photography, jewelry, and sculpture, alongside weekly classes and a writers' group. On Art Walk evenings, downtown galleries, shops, and cafes throw their doors open and the whole street becomes a strolling gallery under the live oaks.

The Gulf Coast Art Association has been painting this region for a century, marking its centennial year in 2026 with an exhibit at the Gulfport Museum of History. Frames-and-art shops around town handle everything from a first print to a commissioned piece. Living here, you are never far from someone who makes something with their hands, which is exactly the spirit this cottage was decorated in.

How to bring the Coast's makers into your home

If the house feels like a gallery, the fun part is deciding what hangs on its walls. Red walls ask for work that is confident: a bold painting, a dark-framed photograph of live oaks and water, a row of small pieces collected over years. Heart pine floors pair beautifully with hand-thrown pottery and woven textiles, the kind of objects you buy because you met the person who made them at a market or an open studio.

Start small and let the house grow with you. A few framed prints from a local photographer who shoots the beach at sunrise, a vase from the Arts Center's gift wall, a quilt draped over the corner of a chair: each one turns a room from a place you sleep into a place that knows where it belongs. That is the quiet joy of a cottage like this. The walls welcome the work, the light shows it off, and you get to live inside a small, personal exhibition that changes whenever you want it to.

The scenery the art is made of

The subjects Gulfport's makers return to again and again are the ones right outside this house. Live oaks with low, reaching branches and soft gray Spanish moss stand guard over the oldest homes, keeping the block cool and shaded even in late summer. The beach is one block east, wide and open, with dunes and sea oats holding the sand at the water's edge. Cross the Popps Ferry bridge at sunrise and you will understand why so many local photographs are of that exact stretch of water: the sky turns shades of coral and copper and nobody is in a hurry.

There is a reason the art here feels alive. The light changes every season, the live oaks frame it, and the water reflects it. A cottage one block from the beach puts you in the middle of that view, and the artists who know the Coast best have spent a lifetime trying to catch it on canvas. Living here, you get to watch them try, then bring a little of it home.

A gentle note about this fall and winter

You may have heard a whisper already, so let us say it plainly: this cottage is coming to HGTV this fall and winter. We cannot spoil the episode, but we can promise the red walls, the gallery hallway, and the heart pine floors all hold their own under the lights. We will share dates and details here as soon as we can. In the meantime, the best way to see the house is the old-fashioned one: come walk the rooms and imagine where you would hang the first piece.