“We’re stuff people,” Kimberly Gronquist tells me as I examine her living room’s floor-to-ceiling shelves. The offerings are rabbit holes, spines upon spines of books—fantasy reads, encyclopedias, historical butted against pop fiction, Kiki Man Ray and Book of Earth face forward—alongside old Barbie dolls, a pink curved alligator, a maneki cat, wicker baskets of masks, and a toy banana, too.

Nester 2025—Kimberly Gronquist (Cameron Munn)

The shelves are just a small sliver of the 1908 home in Southwest Portland or, more accurately, the creative world inside the walls. These four floors—from the multicolored disco-lit basement with the half-pipe, to the wild unfurling ceramics on the walls, dried eucalyptus wreathed across the door frame, or the airy atrium overlooking the English-style garden—are eclectic and warm. But there’s also a hint of spontaneity, artistry teetering on randomness, in an alluring way. “It’s totally not thoughtful,” Gronquist says.

Nester 2025—Kimberly Gronquist (Cameron Munn)

Maybe “thoughtful” isn’t the word—but there’s an intuitive feel, a playfulness that’s a throughline of the home’s history and ethos. Gronquist’s husband, Peter Warren Gronquist, 46, grew up in the house, raised by two artists (his father is filmmaker Don Gronquist). Kimberly, also 46, met Peter while the two attended West Sylvan Middle School. Kimberly’s childhood house wasn’t as warm, and Peter’s home became a safe space where she spent her teen years.

The two later married and spent time living down in California, but returned in 2011 when the house was passed down to them. Since then, the multidisciplinary artist (Peter) and sculptor (Kimberly) have lived in the space with their three kids, Dove, 16, Wolfie, 12, and Cozy, 10. “This had been my safe place to begin with, and coming back was cathartic,” Kimberly says.

Nester 2025—Kimberly Gronquist (Cameron Munn)

There’s been a remodel or two—gutted bathrooms, a more industrial-chic kitchen with wide white tiles—but the space still holds its century-plus-old charm, with the original wide windows, the three fireplaces scattered throughout. It’s a house for fun—a jukebox in the second living room (it’s broken, but there’s an Alexa tucked inside), fuzzy Star Wars stormtrooper helmets as wallpaper in the bathroom, a game room for the kids with a purple-lit play nook. The pop-culture bits spill from every corner, but the trick to keeping the vibrancy buoyant is to keep it from overflowing. “Trying to balance motherhood and actively trying to work on sculpture, I get buried in the things,” Kimberly says. “They’re all collectors,” referring to her family. “It’s hard to keep up with all the things they’re bringing home. I make sure not to become buried in that or I’ll feel heavy.”

Nester 2025—Kimberly Gronquist (Cameron Munn)

While Peter was set to be an artist from a young age (one of his earliest childhood declarations of what he wanted to be as a grown-up hangs on the wall in the office), Kimberly took a different route. She wanted to be an artist, but that desire was repressed and, instead, she became a nurse. After taking time to raise her kids, she slowly began to gravitate back to the creative urge, drawn to ceramic shapes that fall between feminine and oceanic. “I like to call it primal feminism,” she says in her studio, a perched space in the garage behind the house. “I was pounding out trauma from my body; it wasn’t always comfortable, but it was a necessity. It felt frantic.”

After showing her work at Spartan Shop, things continued to evolve from there. She keeps her focus primarily on ceramics, but beyond that, there aren’t rules, and there’s no endpoint. The art, the house, these are ever-evolving things, spaces to remain curious and playful, to let go. “You can continue the work,” she says. “It doesn’t have to stop in the kiln.”

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