Santa Ana Down to Her Toes

Tucked away on a tree-lined street in Santa Ana, a street like those found in small towns throughout the country, is Florence Nalle’s home, which has retained the spirit of the past.

“I call this interior design ‘early Santa Ana,’ ” Nalle says of her three-bedroom house built in the ‘30s. “People came from all over to settle here, so there were many different styles of furniture. I can remember my grandparents’ front parlor that had natural wicker furniture, an easel holding a painting of the mission in San Diego and heavy drapes with tassels on them. It was really a funny-looking room, but it was stylish then.”

Nalle and her late husband bought the house in 1962, taking with them many items from her grandparents’ three-story house on Main Street in Santa Ana--”the last house in town in the 1890s when they settled there,” says the octogenarian.

Nalle grew up and was married in her grandparents’ house. She jokes that her family only moved from the home when the plumber died and no one else knew how to fix the pipes. Today the site is a parking lot.

“The furniture of that period was Victorian, some attractive and some very unattractive,” she says.

In Nalle’s home are chairs in the entryway that she likes, as well as a Victorian chair in the living room that she doesn’t.

Throughout her home are other early Santa Ana touches: paintings on the living room wall given to her father by artists in exchange for his banking services; a brass bed; an antique floor lamp; and photographs, such as the one of 9-year-old Florence and sister Marian taken at Miss Mary Stark’s Studio in Santa Ana.

But it is the antique rug collection, spilling down hallways and into every room, that is her special love. She looks for what she calls “wild” ones, with whimsical people and animals done in bright, cheerful colors. Many are from Russia. A Russian rug depicting horses and hounds that she has in her small library was purchased at an auction 20 years ago at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana.

“Horses were used by the Russian army,” she says. “My husband preferred the more delicate, floral rugs. The Taushandjian rug woven in the ‘20s that covers the entire floor in the living room was one of his favorites. It was originally my parents’. “

A few of the rugs in her house have been used in weddings. The predominately red-and-blue prayer rug in her office was featured in a wedding of childhood sweethearts who married 50 years later, after their previous spouses had died.

“My daughter Becky was married on an antique red carpet [in the dining room] over 20 years ago, and my granddaughter was also married on it at Bowers in May,” she remembers.

Tonight, Nalle will be honored at the Bowers Museum’s 60th anniversary gala for her involvement since the cultural center’s beginning. She attended the opening party in 1936, has served on the board of governors several times and helped curate an Oriental carpet exhibition, even lending the museum a few rugs from her collection.

“I had been married a year when I went to the opening,” Nalle says. “I’ve loved Bowers ever since.”

One of Nalle’s wishes came true this summer when she traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she got a private viewing of a rare 500 B.C. Tazyryk rug from western Russia at the Hermitage Museum, thanks to a letter of introduction written by a Bowers staff member.

“I have over 40 books on rugs, and they all start with a picture of that rug,” says Nalle, who continues to thread together her love of museums, art, rugs and Santa Ana.