by Beth Luberecki

When you meet artist Stacie Caspari, it’s hard not to wonder if she might have been a mermaid or a Roman noble in a past life. Equally inspired by the aquatic and ancient worlds, she creates shell-encrusted pieces that look as if they could be found among the ruins of Pompeii or in an undersea grotto.

Caspari’s personal artistic history dates back to her days as a schoolgirl. While in sixth grade, she painted a wall mural in her family’s home. During high school, she sold some sketches she had done.

She went to college to study fine arts, but her mentor, artist Jen Boyd, feared her studies were having too much of a constricting influence on her work. Boyd encouraged Caspari to leave school and forge her own path, which she’s been doing ever since.

Time spent selling antiques and doing interior design work prepared Caspari for the creation of her first line of furniture, which she embarked upon after moving to Florida some fifteen years ago. “I wanted to create a line of furniture that was new, but that you could have with a four-hundred-year-old antique,” she says. Her painted furniture proved a major success, winning design awards and clients around the globe.

About six years ago, Caspari used her love of European grottos to develop a new furniture collection. Using oyster shells and other treasures from the ocean, she makes mirrors, chests, tables, chairs, wall panels, chandeliers, and other pieces that possess an Old World spirit and an imaginative flair.

“I decided I wanted to create a furniture line that incorporated the European grotto but with a new spin, something fresh that hadn’t been done before,” she says. “The oyster shell, to me, emulates carvings, so I might look at an antique Regency mirror and I’ll create it with oyster shells because that movement is like the carvings. Every design starts with maybe a Regency or classical design, something from antiquity. I like it to look like something from sort of long, long ago.”

That collection was a hit from the get-go, and Florida-based Caspari has been creating the fantastical furniture ever since. It’s been featured in a number of home and design magazines as well as at a Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS event in New York, where Caspari was asked to decorate a ten-by-ten-foot space along with other big names in fashion and design like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Nautica. She turned her space into a Louis XV salon, complete with intricate, shell-covered panels and verre églomisé, a mirror-like, reflective finish reverse painted with gold or metal leaf.

Caspari enjoys taking on this kind of custom work, whether it’s fashioning a fireplace mantle worthy of Neptune for a couple in Sarasota or designing a wedding tiara made from sterling silver, pearls, and diamonds that evokes a siren’s tail and would make any woman feel like a mermaid princess. “Nothing’s too big for me,” she says. “I love everything, big or small.”

She’s found herself working in the Bahamas quite a bit, frequently shipping shell-encrusted chandeliers in huge crates down to the islands for wedding ceremonies there. She and a crew even spent three weeks on the private island of Cat Cay, where they installed custom eight-by-nine-foot shell panels in an octagonal room at an estate.

Caspari used to work out of a studio in Englewood, Florida, but with its glass front it proved too exposed to the curious eyes of passersby. “I really need to be somewhere I can come in and just shut the door and nobody knows I’m here,” she says. “So I can come in and create and not feel like I have to be available to anyone who’s walking by.” She now occupies a temporary, almost garage-like space in Venice but will be moving to a new studio space in Sarasota soon.

There, she’ll continue doing the work she’s become known for, though in a different way than she’s done before. Caspari used to sell her pieces through catalogs, her showroom in Summer Hill, New York, and boutiques throughout the world. But the catalog sales proved too time-consuming and forced Caspari to focus more on turning out the pieces than on the art of creation.

“At that time I had three large studios with about fifteen people working for me,” she says. “It became more of a production type of work, and I just felt like it was too much of the same thing. So now I’m only doing limited editions. So if I do a line of lamps, there are only so many lamps that are done.”

This new approach has allowed Caspari and her six current employees to experiment with different materials and designs, like the crystals and amethysts she’s using in some of her lighting and her classical busts adorned with coral, oyster shells, capiz shells, and other underwater elements.

“I like to keep everything really organic,” she says. “I really have a respect for nature and especially the ocean, so all of these pieces are to celebrate that. We just try to make pieces that, when people see them, it moves them emotionally.”

A self-described “heavy-duty activist” on environmental issues, Caspari works hard to try to protect the natural world she so loves. “For the oyster shells we use, no live oysters are ever harvested,” she says. “These are oysters that have been washed up. I don’t want to have a negative impact on anything environmentally; that’s my big thing.”

When it comes to the home environment, Caspari has found that her pieces tend to work with basically any style of design. “That’s the amazing thing,” she says. “They go with transitional, traditional, eclectic, just everything across the board.

“I like all periods,” she continues. “I don’t have anything against modern. But a piece doesn’t have to be cold and hard to fit into a modern space. You can have something completely organic as long as it’s done in a tasteful manner.”

For more information about Stacie Caspari’s work, call 941-474-9669 or visit www.staciecaspari.com

Beth Luberecki is a Venice, Florida–based freelance writer and an editor for Times of the Islands and RSW Living.