Mary Poppins would be proud. She knew the magical, transformative power of an umbrella.

So, too, does sculptor Jo Anne Fleischhauer, who has taken a run-down, century-old house near Minute Maid Park and transformed it into something whimsical.

At the historical Foley House, colorful parasols blossom through open windows like errant bouquets. The designs on the umbrellas look like petunias but are really reproductions of MRI brain scans.

A haunting soundtrack makes the structure sound as if it's singing and muttering to itself. And, after dark, 80 words are projected onto other windows while the house glows from within.

One of Parasol Project's themes is based on the idea that a house is the repository for a family's secrets, dreams and emotions. Because only one family lived in the house, its imprint seemed even stronger to Fleischhauer.

"This house was a vessel of memories and experiences and feelings that are still in the walls, still in the vapor," she said. "But the house is empty."

The Foley House was built by William L. Foley on Texas Avenue in 1904. Foley, uncle of the brothers who founded Foley's department stores, migrated from Ireland and moved to Houston in 1872. In 1889, he opened a mercantile on Travis Street specializing in ladies accouterments imported from France.

William and his wife, Mary Frances, had six children, three of whom died young. Though the house was moved several times, the surviving siblings — Blanche, Rose and John K. — lived in it until their deaths. Blanche, the last survivor, died in 1965 and left the house to Annunciation Catholic Church in her will. Now it's owned by the city of Houston, which moved it to its current location between the George R. Brown Convention Center and the baseball stadium in 2002. Plans for the building haven't been announced.

Fleischhauer's original idea was to use the house as a sculptural base to explore the changing view of human emotions in the past century.

But after she obtained a grant from the Houston Arts Alliance, her vision expanded to include the house's specific history. She found herself responding to its last inhabitants in ways she hadn't anticipated.

"There's a mystery to them, an aura," Fleischhauer said. "You wonder why they never married. They weren't hermits. They weren't recluses. They were very much out in society, out in the world."

Fleischhauer also explored her original theme — emotion — which was often repressed in the Victorian era and throughout the early 20th century.

Parasols and flowers, Victorian standbys, both were essential to her vision.

Parasols were sometimes used in secret communication. The way a woman held her parasol, shaded her face or revealed her features had coded meaning, particularly between lovers.

The floral theme pops up everywhere. The brain-scan prints have a floral appearance. The original wallpaper in the house was floral; bits of it peek out from behind peeling paint in the bedrooms.

The bouquet imagery is symbolic on another level, too, because love was often expressed with flowers during the Victorian period.

Fleischhauer found black-and-white MRI scans at a medical library, hand-colored them, then enhanced them using computer software. The images were enlarged and printed on satin fabric, then fashioned into 120 standard-size umbrellas by the artist, with the sewing assistance of the Houston Ballet costume department and costume designer Mary Grusak of Boston. She then hung them from the house's facade, balcony and windows, anchored to cagelike frames.

Another intriguing part of the installation is the original soundtrack, played from dawn to midnight. Blanche Foley, an accomplished pianist and soprano, was the first soloist to sing with the Houston Symphony in 1913. Brad Sayles wove an aria once sung by Blanche into his composition. A touch of static makes it sound as if it's being played on a gramophone. Church bells, trains, laughter, applause and the galloping of horses are integral to the piece.

After dark, the glowing words — including "blush," "fever" and "rapture" — take turns appearing on the windows not covered by umbrellas.

"What is expressed in the parlor is very different from what would be expressed in the bedroom," Fleischhauer said. For example, because John K. Foley served in World War I, words associated with war and death emanate from the room thought to be his.

As she contemplated the house before installing the parasols, Fleischhauer was particularly enchanted by the center stairwell ("somehow you can feel the walls breathe here"). She also found solace in the second-floor balcony, where she would pause to consider how the sights and sounds of the neighborhood changed as the house outlasted its family. "I've sat up here and watched traffic on 59 buzzing by," she said.

"By 1960 Blanche was surrounded by progress, and yet she never chose to leave."