When you Google his address, a Google Maps location pops up for “Gene Dillard’s Fantasy Land.”
But Gene Dillard didn’t come up with that name, nor did he create the Google Maps page that calls his house an art museum—he just set out to make sculptures and mosaics. Though he doesn’t mind, he also didn’t realize his sparkling, mirror-covered house would draw visitors, and he certainly didn’t expect a stranger to make it a landmark on Google Maps.
The exterior of the house is covered in mirror, ceramic, and glass bottle mosaic walls and statues. Wire sculptures dot the front yard. In the back, Dillard has built a concrete, glass, and mirror spaceship. Dillard is working on a wizard statue now, which will have an electric light coming from its hand. Other statues include Icarus, but Dillard has built the tragic figure into a better future, with a wife and son.
Dillard worked as a repairman for most of his life, fixing scientific and restaurant supplies. In the early 2000s, he had a bit of a midlife crisis and joined the Peace Corps. When he returned, he began to work on his Northgate Park house.
“I think I enjoy the repetitive motion,” Dillard says. “It’s kind of meditative, you know, I’m sitting there for hours and hours and having arguments with people that aren’t there? Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with it. I don’t know at this point.”
Dillard, now retired, has two children and two grandchildren. The back gate that his neighbors use as a shortcut to see each other without walking around the block is shaped like a self-portrait his granddaughter drew. She was catching a snowflake in her mouth.
His grandchildren helped tile some of his projects, but he does worry about children wandering around his property unattended because of all the glass.
Many of the mirrors Dillard broke to make the swirls, starbursts, and dandelion patterns that scaffold his home, spaceship sculpture, and walls came from the Scrap Exchange. The Durham institution used to give him the broken mirrors for free. When asked if he ever worries about the old superstition that a broken mirror is bad luck, he snorts and says he “hopes so.”
Pieces of ceramic plates, mug handles, and tiles are also embedded into the walls, which wave along the edge of the property, broken up by statues that were originally inspired by Easter Island, before Dillard got bored with that theme. Now there is also a queen, a joker, and a knight built into the wall.
Some of the ceramics are broken pieces from friends who make pottery. There is a full Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle embedded in one wall, a gift from Ninth Street Bakery, where Dillard used to do repairs. The liquor has evaporated a little, but much of it is still in the wall.
A tuxedo cat—live, not a sculpture—lazes on the doormat as Dillard shows me around the property. He says the cat is called Cat. Like the “museum” guests, Cat just showed up one day, perhaps drawn by the mosaics, like everyone else. Birds have built nests in some of the halved glass bottles protruding from the wall, so Dillard has to keep Cat away from them.
Inside, the doorframes and ceilings are covered with colorful mosaic flowers and petals. A tinfoil ball sits in front of the fireplace, made of leftover tin from volunteer shifts at Urban Ministries of Durham. He stopped making the ball when he realized it might not fit back out the front door.
“I can’t make it any bigger or [it] won’t go out, so I don’t bring it home anymore, but eventually it’ll end up in the spaceship,” he says.
The intricate decoration of his home has been well-received by his neighbors. Dillard jokes that if someone started a homeowners association, he’d have to be exempt—he can’t exactly uncement the shards that replaced his siding. People come by to see his progress regularly.
“I was about half done with that archway, and I had a dinner party, and one of the neighbors said, ‘Oh, what are you gonna do next?’ I found it really irritating,” Dillard says. “I was sitting here and I’d had a couple beers. I said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna cut the ceiling now, put the ceiling up.’ And then I couldn’t let go of that.”
This led to his new project: cut out the ceiling, and a friend helped him Sheetrock it. Now it’s covered in red, orange, and yellow flowers. He cut each flower petal tile out of bigger pieces, painstakingly using nippers to break little pieces off.
Dillard has nippers—a tool that looks like oversized nail clippers—tattooed on his arm. Is it an homage to his mosaic house? He shrugs amicably: “Probably.”
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