Devine Design> Bar Harbor woman with passion for reinventing her surroundings helping others do the same

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At night, when the weather warms up, Linda Rosenberry will step out into her garden, light some candles, soak in her claw-foot bathtub and gaze up at the trees, stars and sky.

Bathtub? That’s right — not a hot tub or whirlpool bath — a functioning bathtub, outdoors, in a garden, in downtown Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island.

Discovering Rosenberry’s artful “tub house” tucked in a corner of the small yard outside her apartment in Bar Harbor feels a little like Mary Lennox’s discovery of the old, walled flower garden in the children’s classic “The Secret Garden.”

Lift the latch on the azure-blue door, you’ll find an old, deep bathtub sitting on dainty claw feet. In warm weather, lush ivy and ferns cascade from hanging baskets. Pots filled with plump, yellow and salmon begonias line the tub’s lip. A stained-glass window — with round, bull’s-eye panes — has been inset in the wooden stockade fence surrounding the tub house.

To christen her creation, Rosenberry held a garden party one night late last summer. Her favorite fragrant trumpet, Asisatic and Oriental lilies — Casa Blanca, Black Dragon, Star Gazer and others — were in bloom. She fashioned paper lanterns and strung tiny, twinkling lights around the yard. She served up Chinese buns — steamed rolls stuffed with marinated pork, black bean sauce, seasoned with garlic and ginger — and other delicacies.

“It has always been a fantasy of mine to have an outside bathtub,” she says. “It is just so nice to go outside at night, light some candles and get into the tub.”

On a whim, Rosenberry took pictures of her tub house and entered them in Garden Design’s Golden Trowel Award Contest. To her delight, she was among the dozen or so people who won from around the United States. As a prize, her tub house along with the other Golden Trowel winners’ creations were featured in the magazine’s December issue.

A 1991 graduate of College of the Atlantic, Rosenberry is a largely self-taught designer — indoors and outdoors — who specializes in decorative-painting techniques like combing, sponging, rag-rolling and faux marble.

When she’s not redoing someone’s home or business, she waits tables, works for a caterer and dispatches at the Bar Harbor police station. She says she enjoys stepping in and out of these different worlds.

A tall, fair-skinned young woman with pale-blue eyes, Rosenberry has short blond hair. Clad in a power-blue velveteen shirt and black jeans, her fingernails are painted powder-blue. A pale-blue glass stone set in silver hangs from her neck.

Less than a decade ago, the designer looked like she had stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Back then, she wore long, flowing dresses and her fair hair fell below her waist.

Rosenberry likes reinventing herself and her surroundings.

“You are never finished developing as a person. As you change, your space is always changing,” she says.

Rosenberry got into the design business by accident. Friends saw how she had transformed her apartment and yard. They began asking her for advice. Word of her talents spread.

“I thought to myself, `I can do this,”‘ she recalls.

Several years ago, she took out an ad in the local newspaper. She has since dispensed with advertising because people call her up after seeing the elegant, gray logo on her sky-blue pickup truck.

Since she’s been in business, Rosenberry has had a broad range of design projects. She did the bathrooms at Bar Harbor’s art movie house, Reel Pizza. She layered magenta and deep purple, and used some plastic material — she won’t reveal exactly what — to achieve a visual textured effect on the bathroom walls.

“At Reel Pizza, I traded my work for a year’s worth of movies,” she says, chuckling.

She tackled the interior of the century-old Pine Tree Market, an institution in the Mount Desert Island village of Northeast Harbor. She chose a warm yellow to lighten the place, unite the deli, cooler and produce sections, and diminish the “bowling alley” quality of the combined grocery and liquor store.

Rosenberry says painting the Pine Tree’s walls yellow sparked quite a controversey in Northeast Harbor.

“Everbody said the Pine Tree had been dark green since Christ wore cowboy boots,” she remembers.

At a Northeast Harbor summer cottage, she painstakingly revived delicate, sage-green stenciling done by the family’s matriarch half a century ago.

Rosenberry’s own Bar Harbor home, though, is probably the best example of her work. She decorated it for herself. It reflects her personal taste and ingenuity.

“I had so many blank walls in my house, I went to town …” she says.

In her living room, she used a brush to apply a base coat of of a buttery yellow to the walls. She added another layer of yellow-ochre, and then blended the surface with a rag.

To maximize the sunlight, she arranged sheer white fabric along a “lightening rod,” hung as a curtain rod, above a living room window. A vase of Japanese iris graces a table. A fine Japanese screen of peonies hangs in the stairwell.

The room has a warm, spare look.

“Uncluttered makes me feel uncluttered,” she says.

In the kitchen, Rosenberry covered some of the knotty-pine woodwork with sheetrock panels hand-painted in a harlequin pattern of copper stars and white and dove-gray diamonds.

In the dining area, she hung silk, Chinese-red drapes with scallop rings — the steel rings used in scallop boats’ nets — she chanced upon in a Northeast Harbor hardware store.

In the guest bedroom, a bowl of ripe apples sits on a bedside table made from an overturned wooden tool chest. A mantel retrieved from the dump serves as a shelf to hold plants and pictures.

“Most of my furniture is from yard sales or has been salvaged,” she says. “Usually, I just wait. I know something will appear.”

Originally from Westchester, Pa., Rosenberry traces her creative impulse to her parents. Her mother is a gifted seamstress and her father is a talented photographer.

“I was always rearranging my bedroom and nagging my parents to paint and repaper the walls. I am still their chief decorator,” she says.

At age 15, she worked at the Pennsylvania Colonial Plantation in Ridley Creek State Park. Her role as the eldest daughter at the historic farm was to tend the kitchen and garden. She grew calendula, lavender and other medicinal herbs.

At home, Rosenberry started her own vegetable and herb garden. She made shampoos, facial masks and other natural cosmetics from mint, borage, comfrey, chamomile and other herbs.

“There was always something odd being stored in my family’s refrigerator,” she says.

Rosenberry had vacationed in Maine and was drawn to MDI largely because of the rugged landscape combining the sea and mountains. College of the Atlantic also offered a botany program.

“It was kind of the edge of the world,” she says. “I was interested in being someplace with a natural setting.”

After nearly a decade in Maine, Rosenberry thinks she’s ready for a change. She has taken classes at the Portland School of Art and Newport School of Decorative Painting in Rhode Island. But she would like to further hone her design skills.

This past winter, she traveled to Los Angeles. She was bowled over by the vibrant colors and mix of ethnic cultures in the city. She is thinking about studying design there.

“People paint their houses pink, yellow and turquoise. It’s so green. There were roses blooming in February,” she exclaims.

And in California, she won’t have to wait till summer to step out into her garden, light some candles, have a soak in her bathtub and gaze up at the trees, stars and sky.

Rosenberry can be reached at 288-0510.