Amy Meadows has a thing for miniature chairs. Salesmen’s samples, dollhouse furniture, and replicas dominate a wall in the dining room of the three-bedroom Old Irving Park foursquare she shares with her husband and two teenage children.
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Meadows keeps duplicates from the chair collection in a plastic tub in the basement, alongside containers holding assortments of folk art crosses, antique hand tools (levels, squares, fold-out rulers, crosscut saws), paint-by-numbers art, and vintage souvenir plates from places like the Pro Football Hall of Fame. She rotates the collections into and out of storage, most recently retiring her crosses from a spot in the front room. “Sometimes collecting is simply keeping track of all the things that come your way,” she says.
In fact, decorating a home isn’t so different from styling a store window, she says: “You want to exaggerate for effect in order to catch the eye, amuse, challenge and entertain.” —Tate Gunnerson
“But the sentimental favorite for me is the one that started it all–a winged skull….
“That’s another collection I’d forgotten about. It’s a very rugged, empty frame that a friend of mine found in the alley and brought to me. It was sopping wet. It wasn’t until it dried that I was able to read that somebody had written on the back that the frame had been made from the red oak tree from the front yard on their family homestead. There are three lamps out of carved horn, oversized alabaster grapes and a sculpture of wood, nails and glass that goes back to an American Arts and Crafts Expo from a million years ago.”
I purchased the boxes from a catalog, and I’ve never seen them since. I believe they were a Pottery Barn offering. They’re open at the top, so the idea is to drop, drop, drop. They had one shown with corks. To hold lightweight things that don’t require strategic placement, it becomes a very user-friendly shadowbox.”
