Courtesy | Mary Ellen Sattler
Jilly Beans Coffeehouse owner Mary-Ellen Sattler brought life to the walls of her downtown Hillsdale shop through scenic nature murals full of birch trees and animals.
Sattler asked her niece Danielle Musch, a nursing student at Grand Valley State University, to paint two murals on different walls. Musch finished the first in August 2020 and the second in January 2021.
“It does make it a little bit cozier,” Sattler said. “It gives people something to talk about. People will come in just to see them, because it’s just so neat. It makes looking at those walls so much more pleasant.”
During the first COVID-19 shutdown, Jilly Beans moved to a different location in Hillsdale. The shutdown was spent getting ready to open the new shop.
“We thought it looked beautiful, but it needed something,” Sattler said.
Musch worked on the first mural during last year’s summer break.
“She reached out to me one day saying, ‘Hey, I have a big wall, and nothing to put on it,’” Musch said. “And I was like, ‘Hey, I have paint and nowhere to put it.’”
Throughout four visits to Hillsdale and 24 total hours of painting, rolling purple mountains behind birch trees with soft yellow leaves and a moose standing in deep green grass came to life in the back hallway of the coffeehouse.
“She was a good sport about it,” Musch said. “She told me I had creative freedom, but she wanted a moose. That was my only instruction.”
Sattler named the moose Danielli after Musch finished the painting.
“I can’t even tell you. I’ve always loved mooses,” Sattler said. “Mooses, that’s a word for me. I think they’re a beautiful, majestic animal.”
After Musch did so well on the back hallway’s mural, Sattler asked her to help break up the expansive space in the front of the coffeehouse with another mural.
Now, growing out of grass painted above the baseboard, tall white birch trees with green leaves line the walls and stretch above customers at their tables. A bear holds on to the trunk of a tree with a beehive hanging from its branches.
“I walked in, and it just reminded me of home because I just love the outdoors,” said junior Lily Van Wingerden. “I really loved how it livened up the shop. It provided a very sweet atmosphere that I really appreciated.”
The honey-hungry bear isn’t the only detail Musch included in the mural. Besides other animals, different initials and symbols significant to Sattler are etched into the artwork.
“Just little things that maybe people wouldn’t expect unless they got up really close to it,” Musch said. “And then the more you look, the more you see.”
Some of Musch’s hidden notes are the names of her and Sattler’s dogs, the word “coffee,” and the date of Jilly Bean’s opening. She also added Sattler’s parents’ names to a cardinal in the back wall’s mural.
“I’m sure I haven’t found them all in the front mural,” Sattler said. “She won’t tell me what they all are.”
Musch used plaster to create the texture of the trees in the front of the shop. She finished the second project in just 10 hours over her Christmas break.
“I was really struck with how realistic it looked, especially texture-wise,” junior Alex Dulemba said. “It looked like they went out to find some birch trees and took some bark off and placed it on the wall.”
Musch sketched out only a couple of the trees and worked with Behr paint. A level was the most technical thing she used, she said.
The mural brings a family element to the coffeehouse, according to Sattler. Parents and grandparents bring children to see and touch the murals and look for the hidden messages.
Sattler hopes these murals won’t be the last her niece contributes to the shop.
“I just really want to get the word out and have people come in, even if they just want to look at the murals,” Sattler said. “Bringing this building back to life was a huge thing for Hillsdale.”
