A Custom Backyard Mural by Artist Sarah Schools in a Spring Island Custom Home
Allen Patterson Builders, a NAHB Certified Master Builder and Southern Living Custom Builder Network member based in Beaufort, SC, is currently building a custom home on Spring Island featuring a hand-painted mural by Charleston, SC artist Sarah Schools that brings the homeowners’ own backyard view to life on their walls.
Spring Island sits along the May River in Beaufort County, South Carolina, and is known for its low-density conservation-focused development, with roughly two-thirds of the island’s 3,000 acres permanently preserved as maritime forest, tidal marsh, and wildlife habitat. It’s this landscape — live oaks draped in Spanish moss, palmetto stands, tidal creeks, and the birds that move through them — that inspired the mural now taking shape inside this home.
The Mural: Bringing the Backyard View Indoors
Rather than a generic wildlife scene, the mural was designed to reflect the actual view from this Spring Island home’s backyard — a hand-painted, site-specific landscape rendered in a soft, monochromatic blue-gray palette that echoes the tonal quality of a Lowcountry morning. Artist Sarah Schools painted the piece directly, capturing:
- A spoonbill in flight, wings extended, moving across an open sky
- Butterflies and dragonflies drifting among the tree canopy
- Palmetto trees, live oaks, and Spanish moss, framing a still tidal creek
- Marsh grasses and wading birds along the water’s edge
The result is a mural that doesn’t just decorate a wall — it extends the home’s connection to the Spring Island landscape just outside its windows, a detail consistent with how Allen Patterson Builders approaches custom home design across Beaufort County: rooting each home in the specific place it’s built, rather than a generic aesthetic.
About the Artist
The mural was hand-painted by Sarah Schools, a Charleston, SC-based artist inspired by the Lowcountry landscape and the interplay of light, shadow, and color. Her hands-on approach to this piece — painting layer by layer, directly on the wall, without stencils or wallpaper — gives the mural a level of texture and depth that’s difficult to achieve any other way.
A Custom Home Built for Its Site
This mural is one detail among many in a custom home currently under construction on Spring Island by Allen Patterson Builders. As with all APB projects, the home is being built to reflect its specific setting — in this case, one of the Lowcountry’s most protected barrier island environments — with interior details like this mural reinforcing that connection between the house and the land it sits on.
Follow along as this Spring Island custom home nears completion, or contact Allen Patterson Builders to discuss a custom home built for your own Lowcountry setting.