D r. Linda Merrill Howes-Graham
lived in western Pennsylvania for more than
a decade,where it snows from October until
May, “I got so tired of snow, that I would
dream of the tropics. I would dream of
Bali,” she says. … “I would think, ‘one day
I’m going to live where it’s warm.’”
Before purchasing the Parsley House at the corner of Third and Ann
streets, Howes-Graham owned a Queen Anne home in Somerset,
Pennsylvania, that had been restored as a bed and breakfast. She
filled it with antiques, some from her mother, some from an early
family home in Rye, New York, some from a New York City apart-ment
when she was a resident doctor and some from Guadalajara,
Mexico, where she attended medical school for three years.
“I’m a nest builder,” Howes-Graham says. “When I was a little
girl, in the yard, all the kids in the neighborhood, in the bushes, and
we’d say, ‘now this is the living room and this is the dining room.’”
“I knew if I had a nest that I could come home to, I could set the
world on fire,” she says. A collector of interior design and furnish-ings
books and magazines, Howes-Graham savored her favorite pages
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WBM october 2012
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An Italianate roof crowns the Parsley House at the corner of Third and Ann
streets in historic Wilmington. Opposite, left, Dr. Linda Howes-Graham’s
favorite is the living room with its view of Third Street .