“I love his aesthetic,” Ms. Jacobs said. “But I can’t really live in that environment. I mean, I like being in it, but he has to clean up after me. He cooks, he cleans; I don’t. It’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship. I’m used to living in squalor.”

South Florida’s real estate stories are not always so positive, but one person’s tragedy can be another’s opportunity. Foreclosures here are still rampant; in many areas, property values are still declining.

In 2010, Mr. Pardo and Ms. Jacobs’s bungalows, which are about 700 square feet each and were built in 1925, were in foreclosure. Last January, Mr. Pardo bought them from the bank for $62,520. Property records show that more than 10 years ago, the houses sold for nearly $90,000; their assessed tax value in 2009 was just under $100,000.

Mr. Pardo put another $70,000 or so into restoring them, much of that spent on materials, since he and Ms. Jacobs did most of the work themselves.

WHEN they met, Mr. Pardo and Ms. Jacobs were both spending time in Florida because of their parents. Ms. Jacobs’s mother has a condo here. Mr. Pardo, who owns a building and a gallery on Lake Avenue here, had moved his elderly parents from Hudson, N.Y., to Lake Worth a few years earlier because it was an easier place to care for them.

He was living monastically, he said, sleeping in his gallery and focused on his parents, when a friend took him to Ms. Jacobs’s 50th birthday party.

“I had fallen in love with her work first,” Mr. Pardo said. “And then when I saw her it was love at first sight — for me, that is. Laura had the bird on her shoulder. I thought, ‘This bird is totally at home with her. She’s totally at home with herself, totally comfortable in her own skin.’ That was one of the things I found mesmerizing.”