Tour an Artsy Atlanta Home Full of Houseplants and Botanicals

Cary Smith, left, and Libby Hockenberry, right, opened their plant store the Victorian Atlanta in 2017 and moved into new quarters earlier this year. Libby’s parents sparked her love for plants from a young age, and it’s a love she and Cary continue to cultivate together as they’ve collected hundreds of plants to decorate their home. “My parents were huge gardeners when I was little, and we were always out working in the yard,” Libby says. When she went off to college, her mom sent her away with cuttings from her houseplants, which Libby says were very comforting for her to have around. Now, she and Cary are instilling that love in countless others who come to them for advice on fostering their own plant-filled homes.

Libby and Cary’s Atlanta home is a three-bedroom, two-bath Craftsman-style bungalow built in 1924. They’ve been painting, decorating, adopting more plants and, more recently, building backyard greenhouses in their spare time away from the shop. Plant parenthood has exploded in trendiness this year as more people are spending far more time at home, so we asked them where to start if you want to cultivate your own jungle —no green thumb required.

Throughout their house, signs of Libby and Cary’s creativity add unique and striking touches to their home jungle. Many rooms are decorated with pieces they’ve made or built throughout the years, like the wood and metal sculpture here, which is an abstract orchid Libby created her senior year of art school. The leather couch is from Article.

Cary is a talented photographer, and studied photography in college. Many of the photographs he took in school are now beautiful decor in their home. This poster is a custom print of images he took of hunters for a school project and has had for many years, but it looks perfectly suited to this corner of the living room. The plant on the floor to the left is one of the oldest they have in their house, an Adenia spinosa that may be 30 to 40 years old.