Shop Christine's Picks
Photographed by Christopher Leaman
"I've been collecting since my friends and I got our driver's licenses. Back then Monday night was for "Picking" (garbage night) and Saturday mornings were for "Sailing" (garage sales). The problem is, once you start collecting something, you're obligated. People give it to you, or you just start looking for it. Like lady paintings—I bought my first one in Brooklyn 20 years ago, and now whenever I see a good one, I have to buy it."
"The gnomes are getting out of hand. We used to have them only in the garden outside, but now they're multiplying like rabbits. I just brought one back with me from Copenhagen. I had to build a shelf above the kitchen window to display them all."
"We probably moved eight times in five years at one point. We've lived in a '70s townhouse, a Victorian duplex, a carriage house from the 1800's, a log cabin, and a historic hotel. This is the first house that we have ever owned, and we've been here for three years, and it's kind of crazy to think 'I can do whatever I want.' The one condition our cats have had with anywhere we've lived—it has to have a fireplace. "
"I like to mix prints, patterns, texture, styles. I've really been in love with anything that has bright stripes lately. But I don't over-think it. Basically, if it interests me chances are it's going to end up somewhere in our house and possibly all in the same room. I just buy what I love and somehow it all sits together happily."
"This tree trunk table came from a lodge in the Poconos. The top has a carved out spot for stashing treasures and it reminds me of the hollow tree Boo Radley uses to stash the kids' gifts in To Kill a Mockingbird. I bought the glass house sculpture from one of Urban Outfitters' display artists, David Mitchell."
"So I got these teak bookshelves on eBay from a guy in Ohio. I made my husband drive to pick them up behind a Holiday Inn. It was admittedly a little sketchy. I thought—either I'm never going to see my husband again, or I'm going to have one really cool looking bookshelf. Even when I lived in a small studio apartment I've always had a large bookcase, I used it as room divider."
"My father always took slides when we were growing up—mostly Kodachrome. I used to run the family slide shows, so I inherited the entire collection of slides from our family and I'm the youngest of six girls, which means there are a lot of them. My dad was actually published in this book, which was a project that included a Kodachrome from someone in every state. That's my family in Long Island circa 1963."
"This is our sun porch, we hang out here a lot in the summertime, especially at night. Usually we're playing cards or board games and listening to this radio, which used to sit on our kitchen counter when I was a kid. It still sounds great. Growing up we rented the same vintage cottage for two weeks every summer in Vermont and this room reminds me of that place, which was pretty magical."
"This was taken of me on my 18th birthday, along with one of my best friends, Johnny, who had just bought me a vintage copy of The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, and is reading it to me. My bedroom back then was entirely white, because I was going to art school and had definite aspirations of living in a huge loft and painting all day."
"This is my 8-year-old daughter's Pez collection, which she is very proud of, and Niall from One Direction guarding it. Now she's usually the one who wants to wake up early on a Saturday and hit the garage sales. I have an app on my iPhone that links to Craigslist and she likes mapping everything out."
"I got the fake fireplace on Craigslist for $40, and the insert is from Duraflame and I got it for $90. It's a space heater and heats up the whole bedroom and it comes with a remote control! It's kind of ridiculous. I found the roses painting at Les Puces de Saint-Ouen Market in Paris and hauled it back with me on the plane. I couldn't leave without it."
"This little vintage wire bookcase wound up being inspiration for an Urban product. The pink '50s phone works—a friend got it for me on Canal Street in NYC for $5. The jewelry box belonged to my awesome Grandma Estelle and used to sit on her dresser. She didn't want to give it to me because it was little beat up even back then, but I'm so glad she did. It reminds me of her and I use it to display my collection of vintage pins, mostly Bakelite and Lucite."
"This was my husband George's writing desk when he was a little boy. I refinished it and turned it into a vanity. I found the mirror on Craigslist and screwed it into the back. I found the antlers in Chicago at this amazingly cool antique store called Woolly Mammoth. I'd never seen a pair with a heart-shaped back before and it displays necklaces quite nicely."
"This wooden lady head is one of my very favorite things. I found her at Brimfield. Somehow I wandered onto this field that wasn't open yet and everything was fresh, and the minute I walked onto the field, I saw her and I was like, 'Oh my God.' I love her bouffant. She just looks like a juvenile delinquent from the '60s. I love the spirit of outsider art, and thrift store paintings. I tend to buy misfit things, and I usually never pay more than $50 for them."
"I had to have knotty pine in the house. We looked everywhere, and we finally found a mill in South Jersey that had the same profile of vintage knotty pine from the '60s and they'd never stopped making it. This is one of my favorite vignettes, a nice little rest from the clutter. I'm constantly curating and editing the stuff in our house. I sometimes get bored with a piece, but then I start to pull it together in a different way with something from across the house, and suddenly it looks totally new."
"The dining room furniture is vintage Heywood-Wakefield. It's made from bleached solid birch, and then stained so it has this amazing butterscotch glow. I knew that I wanted an antler chandelier hanging over it, so I spent weeks online looking for one. We never had a dining room before and I wasn't sure we'd really use it. But we actually hang out in here all the time. The next thing that we're saving up for is a jukebox, and it has to be this exact one, so now I am obsessively searching for that."
"The first place my husband and I lived together was a rented 1930s log cabin on Long Island that was built as a summer home. It was kind of crazy and I really wanted to buy it, but I was only 23 and owned a store at the time and so we didn't have any money. And we always say we wish we had bought it, and so the running joke with my husband, and even now my daughter, is that I'm trying to turn our house into a log cabin. And that's probably why I bought a red house and painted the door green."
"The wallpaper we installed is all hand-screened dead stock, from the '40s. The colors are really pretty and you can see where the register is off in some spots. It didn't have paste on the back, but we found one old school guy in New Jersey who was able to paste it up, piece by piece. When the wallpaper guy put his sign up on the front lawn our neighbors came over and said, "I see you're getting rid of that hideous old wallpaper that came with your house. We had that problem, too." And we were like, "Um...no...actually we're putting it up!"
