KELLI STANKO

Harlan and Heather Dam bought their home in 2000, and worked with landscape designer Charles Salmon to add its flowering island out front and bring its original ixoras back to blooming glory.

KELLI STANKO

Harlan and Heather Dam stand at the entrance to their galleria living room. The couple added a rail to the step down into the room to keep visitors from taking a tumble while they were admiring the paintings.

KELLI STANKO

Across the wall from these seven paintings in the family room are a nearly equal number on the other side. The Dams find their paintings, as well as their eclectic furniture, in antique and secondhand stores.

KELLI STANKO

Even the kitchen has art on its corner wall, and a diagonal backsplash accented with colors from the paintings in the adjacent dining and family rooms.

KELLI STANKO

The bed in the master bedroom is surrounded by some of the Dams’ favorite art. Central to it is a horse race painted by a Yugoslavian artist whose work they began collecting.

KELLI STANKO

A richly toned painting of Ukrainian iron workers appears to be at the top of a trio of paintings, but the dominant-blue ceramic works are actually on a privacy wall outdoors. Uplights turn them into subtle night illumination.

KELLI STANKO

The Dams’ landscape designer, Charles Salmon, set up a terraced garden to give the yard more visual interest. The area is crosslighted at night to create an enchanted garden look.

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NAPLES — Far too many people buy paintings to go with their furnishings. Harlan and Heather Dam buy furnishings to go with their paintings.

The open-plan kitchen of their Imperial Golf Estates home has a backsplash of white diagonal tile with 1-inch blocks of primary colors. That’s to better complement the landscape and portrait art in their adjacent dining and family rooms. Low cabinetry offers breathing space for a huge portrait of a wistful youngster and an oversized colorist .piece by local artist Marilyn Crawford.

In the family room, wheat- and coffee-toned seating, solid white walls and eggshell ceramic tile maximize its artistic focal points. Thrust forward by its background, a 4-foot-by-3-foot nude with bouquet above the fireplace locks in roaming eyes. Commanding the second gaze is a Tibetan rug in reds, golds and steel blue. Nearly a dozen more works fill the walls on either side.

This home, with its 70 works of art, is dedicated to the principle that you should buy what you love. The Dams love art, and they both say they don’t think it has to be expensive to be worthy.

“We’ve told people you don’t have to buy art that has a big names on it. You buy something that is painted well,” Harlan Dam declares.

“I spent more on the frame than we did on this painting,” Heather Dam says, pointing to a lush Parisian street scene in a similarly lush 7-inch gilt frame. “We never did find a name on it.”

“But it’s a beautiful piece,” adds her husband.

There's a chance to unearth some treasures, too. After years of admiring the impressionist work of Antoine Blanchard and buying pieces reminiscent of his style, Harlan Dam found a street scene telegraphing the artist’s characteristics from among some consignment discards — for $600. He later showed it to a Chicago appraiser, who couldn’t quickly confirm its pedigree, but asked him if he’d be willing to sell it.

“I said, ‘Why would I do that?” he said, laughing.

In fairness, Dam says he’s been able to learn a lot about art as a benefit auctioneer, one of his charitable pursuits during a career with Commonwealth Edison, primarily in Illinois. Heather Dam, a radiation dosimetrist from Erie, Pa., has picked up her love of it naturally, and the two say they don’t buy a work unless they agree on it. Some of their artistic choices have created enduring friendships, such as with the late Gustav Likan, former artist to Eva Peron. Three of his color-washed scenes hang in their home, including one dedicated to both of them.

They love local art too. Several pieces by Ed Park are in the family room and their study. A trio of Tom Ross scenes is atop the living room sliding doors.

There are even artworks in the bathroom: an intense oil of Ukrainian iron workers hangs over the tub and its two windows look out on a privacy wall with two ceramics. A pair of spots trained on them are an impressive night light in the room.

“Everything in this house was bought because we like it,” Harlan Dam declares. That is as true for their $50 treasures as well as the most expensive work.

The Dams moved from a condo to the Imperial Golf Estates home in 2000,knowing they had serious updating in store on the 1987 house.

“But we could see this place had good bones,” says Heather Dam. One of the first things they did was add a rail at the step along the perimeter of the sunken living room. The design device of the time was causing too many tumbles.

“I got to waving my arms when people came,” she recalls. “I’d tell them, ‘I am welcoming you with open arms, but I’m also warning you there’s a step down back there.’” It didn’t work.

They just finished their master bedroom this year, adding celery-toned paint to the walls that softens its collection of framed artwork. The master bath has a rare wooden floor, with inserts of Tahitian mahogany that perfectly twin the hand-scraped French Bleed maple floor there and in the bedroom.

Earlier, the couple gutted the kitchen of its dated Caribbean white look to install cherry cabinets with Juparana Gold granite surfaces. An antique set of drawers from their condo was given a granite top and a new role as a sideboard. Then the couple worked their way down the hall, refacing the laundry room cabinets with stained alderwood and taking out an old clothes hamper to add a pantry for cleaning tools and clothes hangers for pressed items. There is cupboard space there for Heather Dam’s collection of antique plates. (Yes, they use them, especially for elegant dinners with friends, she adds.)

Of course there’s art — a painting of fat golden pairs and an autumn woodscape.

There are more pieces in a guest bedroom where the entertainment center has been set up in the closet to add space; in a third bedroom and pewter-papered guest bath and certainly back in the fourth bedroom, which has been converted to a study. Here, however, the back yard competes, with a 40-square-foot terraced garden that shows off a variety of weeping hibiscus, epiphytic and terrestrial orchids, musseanda, crotons and variegated arbicola. The couple’s landscape designer, Charles Salmon, devised both that and a front-yard rock island that is always in perfect bloom. That’s because its foliage is in baskets cleverly tucked in among the rocks. If one overgrows its container, it can be planted in the ground somewhere else and a new container installed.

It’s like having more art and being able to change it each season. And the Dams will tell you: They definitely love that.

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About this home

• Location: Imperial Golf Estates

• Profile: 2 baths, 3 bedrooms plus a den-study

• Area: 2,700 feet

• Built: 1987