Our Story

Where We Started

Owner and Principal Designer of Hanover Avenue, Anne Hulcher Tollett has spent her decades long interior design career creating pretty rooms for her clients across the country and abroad. From high-end residential to boutique commercial spaces, she and her team focusing on beautiful rooms that feel like a perfect reflection of who their clients are, what they love, and how they love to live.

In 2022, Anne’s eldest daughter became seriously ill, and for months, they searched for answers to no avail with countless doctors. Eventually, her darling girl was diagnosed with very late stage four Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Anne and her family’s lives were turned upside down. Somehow, from the pain and heartache, Anne found refuge in her work. The refrain “Pretty Rooms Cure Cancer!” could be heard many times a day in the Hanover Avenue studio.

Below, in Anne’s words, is the story of how an inner-studio rallying call evolved into raising funds for new and innovative cancer research and lifesaving diagnostic equipment.

Pretty Rooms Cure Cancer

Langdon’s lungs looked like a still lake between mountains on a warm summer afternoon—sun rays between clouds reflected off of calm waters. I audibly gasped, “Oh, Nug! Look how beautiful you are on the inside!” Unsuspecting of any danger, we both stared at what looked like a monochrome Beirstadt painting glowing on the technician’s screen. We were mesmerized by the image, the dimmed room, the whir of the machine, and the hope that this exercise would give us answers.

The last time either of us were together for an ultrasound, she was growing inside of me, and that realization made me choke back tears. Our very first image of my darling daughter (which earned her the nickname “Nugget”) was of a Precious Blob.

But unlike the first time, when we didn’t even know her sex and could only daydream of who she would become, I was now seeing her from the inside out, both fearless and innocent. A child who was always kind to the bone, evolving into a brilliant and charming fifteen-year-old. “Tomorrow, I am going to get a pedicure and see Batman with my friends,” she said happily. I beamed at her, my heart swelling with love. None of that was happening tomorrow, and we didn’t know it yet.

Beauty from Horror

It’s a strange thing how the mind can create beauty from horror when you are completely unaware of what you are seeing. How could massive tumors of late-stage lymphoma translate in my mind to one of the prettiest landscapes I’d ever seen? Only years later do I understand. Imagining and creating beauty is a part of my whole life’s work. My practically unconscious ability to transform unattractive things into pretty things is a mental gift I always treasured, and it became my most reliable tool in navigating the very ugly realities of childhood cancer.

There is a frantic, unrelenting, and helpless desperation that comes from watching your child fight to beat cancer, have it return on the anniversary of her first diagnosis, and then beat it again. Both the head and the heart fight to make the unimaginable bearable. Your entire being strives to create a pattern from the broken rhythm and pure chaos cancer can create in a family. Life begins to be a bizarre series of fire drills and fear spikes. Days become years. And, miraculously, human resilience kicks in—directing you to calm ports in the storms. I experienced this welcome respite when challenging moments almost crushed my resolve.
But cancer costs a family both emotionally and financially, and I had to keep working. Fortuitously, showing up to make our clients’ houses pretty gave me an outlet where I could temporarily forget my worries.

“Because Pretty Rooms Cure Cancer”

Often when I’d arrive to reveal new designs, my clients would ask with true concern, “Why and how are you here for this meeting?!” I knew they cared deeply about my daughter, and I’d sincerely answer, “Because pretty rooms cure cancer!”

And that simple phrase encompassed a tapestry of emotions, hope, human truths, and—more than anything else—the belief that if we can surround ourselves with beauty and comfort, we can improve our mental outlook and ultimately our health.

Creating beauty for someone else allowed me to pause the brutality of watching my child suffer. Designing pretty rooms was regenerating me, and as a recharged mother, I was able to be a better caregiver. Her wise oncology team often reiterated that when parents behave normally, it gives the sick child a sense of security and strength, making it easier for them to beat their wicked disease.

In the early days of Langdon’s cancer returning, the president of the children’s hospital told me, “What stands in the way BECOMES the way!” I was crying on the phone with him, and at the moment I had no idea what that even meant; all I knew to do was scribble it down because it sounded important. And three years later, I understand: Childhood cancer is cruel, childhood cancer robs innocence, childhood cancer puts dreams on hold, but finding the ability to carry on, to live, to still find beauty, opens the world up for new miracles.

Our Rallying Cry

Darling Nugget’s cancer is the worst thing I could ever imagine, but through its hell, my family and I have experienced some of the most tender and treasured moments of our lives, and through it all, some of the most beautiful spaces came to life as she healed. My interior design practice helped me cope with the unique pain that comes from watching your child fight to live. As “Pretty Rooms Cure Cancer” became a common refrain in our studio,  I had no idea a simple saying would become what it is today. We now use it as the rallying cry to raise money for next-generation treatments, new equipment, and a quest to drive awareness and research so that no other child or family might ever have to endure cancer’s brutality.

Here, I share the story of the pretty rooms that my team and I worked on as my daughter fought and lived. Our cancer journey and the story of these evolving rooms and the people who live in them sustained us through an unimaginable darkness. Hopefully, we can give back and pay beauty forward, and someone who is suffering with a family cancer diagnosis can find their own intermission from the fear, imagine a better day, and pause for a moment to indulge in the peace people have always found in beautiful spaces.