Things to Do in Durham

Inside a mint-green Victorian Home, the experienced artists at Artascope Studios share their expertise in various mediums with adults and teenagers of all skill levels. Throughout a schedule of workshops, instructors provide all the necessary supplies as they teach groups how to craft jewelry out of wire, beads, or metal, arrange glass bits into colorful mosaics, and use paint to expressively capture a mountain landscape's majesty or a urban wilderness's hidden Waldos. They also lead three-hour intensive Art Night Out sessions that focus on specific projects such as crocheting wire or setting a resin pendant. Through reservation, Artascope's experts can host private parties and one-on-one lessons.

Built between 1858 and 1860 as a summer home for hotelier Ruggles Sylvester Moore, the Victoria Mansion continues to dazzle visitors more than 150 years later with its Italian villa-style low-pitched roofs and soaring architecture made from locally sourced Connecticut brownstone. After a hurricane swept through the region in 1938 and badly damaged the mansion, it was scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt as a gas station until a retired educator, Dr. William Holmes, rescued the property. He turned it over to the Society of Maine Women of Achievement, which now operates it as an historic house museum and National Historic Landmark.

Conservation efforts have gradually restored the mansion’s brownstone front steps, balusters, and decorative carved finials; the Islamic-inspired paintings in its Turkish Room; and the Pompeian-style painted walls of its preserved mid-19th-century water closet. Elsewhere, palatial gilded surfaces and stained glass add color to the interior, juxtaposed by modern conveniences such as hot and cold running water, central heating, and robot janitors.

As an inherently talented singer growing up in Maine's woodlands, Kalee learned the ameliorative effects of sonic vibrations from Mother Nature's symphony of birds, insects, trees, and naturally occurring Bee Gees. After she attended the Psychic Horizons and the Sound & Consciousness Institute in San Francisco, she took her set of crystal singing bowls and embarked on a career in sound healing, which strives to remedy a variety of physical and mental ailments with soothing tones. Kalee regularly shares her meditative music during concerts, hosts sound-healing workshops, and helps demystify life's puzzling events with psychic readings.