Our Journey

It started with a stack of discarded books.

Hi! I'm Lauren, the interior decorator and book nerd behind Bless'er House.

When I was 14, my mom, a high school librarian, came home one afternoon carrying stacks of tattered books that were being discarded from her school library. She plopped them down on our kitchen table, and among them was a book filled with the vibrant bird and botanical artwork of John James Audubon.

We decided those beautiful pages were far too pretty to go to waste.

So we carefully pulled out our favorites, tucked them into dollar store frames, and hung them all over the walls of our very 1990s kitchen. We were so proud of that little mother-daughter art project.

I didn't know it then, but that afternoon started a lifelong love of finding beautiful old art and giving it a new place to tell its story.

Making beautiful art work on a tiny budget

A few years later, I moved into my college dorm room with approximately zero dollars to spend on decorating but plenty of determination to make those cinderblock walls feel like home.

I collected inexpensive, used picture calendars filled with black-and-white photographs of Paris and Ansel Adams landscapes, cut out my favorite pages, and arranged them into gallery walls.

For about $5, my tiny dorm room suddenly felt infinitely more sophisticated.

It taught me something I've carried with me ever since: beautiful art has the power to completely change the way a room feels, and it doesn't have to be expensive to be meaningful.

Then I discovered a gold mine.

In 2013, after my husband, our daughter, and I moved into our first house, I stumbled across something I couldn't believe more people weren't talking about: public domain art archives.

Museums and libraries around the world had digitized incredible works of art: paintings, sketches, botanicals, landscapes, illustrations, many of them hundreds of years old and available for the public to discover.

I was completely hooked.

I spent hours virtually digging through old library and museum archives looking for forgotten gems. (I didn't even know what I was doing had a name. I just thought I was treasure hunting.)

And I couldn't keep the secret to myself.

Through my blog Bless'er House, I began restoring and reformatting some of my favorite discoveries and sharing them as free printable art so other homeowners decorating on tight budgets could fill their walls with beautiful pieces too.

Over the years, millions of people have visited Bless'er House for budget-friendly decorating ideas and art resources.

And one question kept coming up:

"What's the best way to get these art downloads printed?"

For years, I'd send everyone to their local office supply store. It worked... but it was a hassle having to upload and format the files for print services. I always wished I could point them toward an easier option that gave these beautiful old works the quality they deserved.

Eventually, I realized we should create it ourselves.

And that's how Bless'er Art was born.

Bless'er Art Print Shop is the next chapter of something I've loved since that day in 9th grade pouring over discarded picture books with my mom.

Some of the pieces in our collections are recognizable masterpieces whose originals hang in museums around the world.

But my favorites are often the ones you've probably never seen before.

There are thousands upon thousands of beautiful works tucked away in archives quietly waiting to be rediscovered. Behind each one was an artist with a story to tell, and I love the idea that their work can be given new life generations later.

We carefully curate those forgotten treasures, digitally clean and restore them while preserving the character that makes old art so beautiful, reformat them for today's homes, and print them on museum-quality paper worthy of the artwork itself.

Because we don't want antique art to stay buried in an archive.

We want it hanging in your home.

A piece painted generations ago can become part of a gallery wall in your hallway. A centuries-old landscape can hang above the bed where you read bedtime stories. A forgotten botanical can become the finishing touch in your kitchen.

The artist's story doesn't end when the painting disappears into an archive.

It gets to become part of yours.

And after all these years, from discarded library books and dollar store frames to $5 college calendars, free printables, and forgotten museum archives, I still feel the same little thrill when I find the one.

I hope you feel it too when it arrives at your doorstep.

Welcome to Bless'er Art! I'm so glad you're here.

Blessings,

Lauren