Shortly after Jody Hemphill Smith and her husband, attorney and musician Mark Paul Smith, put the Castle Gallery on the market last summer, they took it off the market.

A newspaper story about the listing brought incredulous Castle Gallery fans out of the proverbial woodwork, and not just local woodwork.

Hemphill Smith says artists called from “all over the country” and they were “horrified at the idea of this not being around.”

The rationale behind the sale was that Hemphill Smith felt she needed more time to work on her own art.

“I thought we should downsize,” Hemphill Smith says, “that I should go back to the old house and my old studio and focus on my art. We got some very attractive offers, but we realized we couldn’t bear to part with it. It has actually been financially successful, so why?”

A person might be tempted, therefore, to look upon the upcoming Valentine’s Show as a recommitment ceremony of sorts.

The Valentine’s Show debuts with a sumptuous opening reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday.

As art galleries go, the Castle Gallery has a distinctiveness that extends well beyond comparisons involving Fort Wayne counterparts.

The Castle Gallery is the former home of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and it is the current residence of Hemphill Smith and her husband.

The interior is gorgeous enough to qualify as cover-story material for such publications as Architectural Digest, Elle Décor or House Beautiful.

But the atmosphere of Castle Gallery is anything but haughty. It’s cozy and inviting.

Hemphill Smith says she first proposed to her husband the idea of buying the house 17 years ago, but Mark Paul Smith replied, “Yeah, we’ll buy that house when pigs fly.”

To commemorate those famous last words, a pig-themed weather vane was installed on the roof of a freestanding studio behind the gallery.

Among other famous last words were those used by Hemphill Smith to convince her husband that the future home of the Castle Gallery was a good buy.

“I told him, ‘It’ll be neat to have it because everything’s done,’ ” she recalls. “We’ve been working on it for 17 years.”

Hemphill Smith says the house was divided into three condos when they bought it, but the gallery gradually expanded into those spaces until it filled the entire building.

There are many accents in the Castle Gallery that are infused with the joie de vivre of its proprietors.

In a laundry room where Mark Paul Smith once sang the Doors’ song “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” while busting down a wall, there’s a sign hanging from the ceiling that says “Jim Morrison Memorial Drive.”

Hemphill Smith says the house has yielded several surprises over the years as she and her husband have remodeled.

There were the discoveries of a buried staircase and a pair of sliding stained-glass doors that were concealed to address the needs of the moment.

A second-floor stained-glass window that opens out over the main staircase was used by the house’s first inhabitant, B. Paul Mossman, to stifle unruly children and child-like adults on the first floor.

“He used to lean out and say, ‘There’s too much noise down there!’ ” she says.

On the third floor, there is a self-contained apartment that seems conducive to both artistic endeavors and social ones.

“The only problem is that I feel like I don’t get out much,” Hemphill Smith says. “It’s kind of a wonderful place to be.”

One scarcely need make a single corroborating phone call to be able to state that the Castle Gallery is the only gallery in town with nine bedrooms and eight baths. Hemphill Smith says the bedrooms can come in handy.

“If a visiting artist is over-served, he can stay over,” she says.

In the Castle Gallery, the house can accentuate the artwork in unexpected ways.

Joel Fremion’s fabric portrait of Mark Paul Smith and his dog named Ringo Starr is impressive on its own, but there’s something about the bed it hangs over and the room it hangs in that deepens one’s appreciation of the piece.

And if Mark Paul Smith has his mischievous way, some of Tuck Langland’s sculptures may be positioned in such a manner that they point visitors in relevant directions.

The 40-plus artists featured in the Valentine’s Show hail from either coast and points of interest in between, but one thing their work seems to have in common is elegance and accessibility.

At Saturday’s opening, there will be dark chocolate and white chocolate fountains and a cash bar featuring wine chosen by Jeffrey Armstrong of Wine Time. Jim Steele will play piano.

Hemphill Smith says the combination of elements make this opening reception a quintessential romantic outing.

Items are priced from “a dollar to $15,000,” so “everyone can go home with a piece of art,” Hemphill Smith says.

spen@jg.net