- See more at: http://blogtimenow.com/blogging/automatically-redirect-blogger-blog-another-blog-website/#sthash.p5VL3RkF.dpuf The Old Lucketts Store Blog: June 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Hats off to summer style

Our vintage clothing fans will be pleased.  We just got in dozens of vintage hats and hat boxes!  Ann scored this newest bunch at a recent estate sale.  The previous owner had impeccable taste and took great care of her hats, so Ann bought up the entire collection!  Here are a few favorites available now on the third floor of The Old Lucketts Store.

This is a vintage Dana Marte straw hat.  The designer started out in West Germany and then gained fame in New York and Paris.  This hat is available for $39 now, but in its day, would have been the equivalent of a minimum of $140 - a significant investment back then and also today.  

This hat is a work of art designed by Lilly Dache, a French milliner and fashion designer born in 1898.  Lilly designed for Hollywood films and had many clients who were movie-stars, including Marlene Dietrich, Caroline Lombard, and Loretta Young.  The hat boxes these hats came in are works of art too.  The vintage boxes bear the names of vintage department stores that have long since been bought up or consolidated.

When buying hats, Ann looks for well known designers, quality materials, and buys only examples that have been well kept.  Price points are set by those factors (designer, materials, condition) as well as subject matter, style, and date.  This hat with a cherry on top is by the designer Mr. John.

How do you date a hat?  If you understand silhouettes that were popular over time, it gets more straightforward.  Old movies are great resources to see what styles were popular in different decades.  Does this hat's silhouette remind you of Audrey Hepburn?  Now you can date it with pretty good accuracy. 

Need a new hat to get ready for summer?  Look at the beautiful vintage straw, tulle, and floral pieces available at the shop.  


***UPDATE:  Here is the link to Wild Thyme on Facebook.  Be sure to like this page for new info. on what Ann is bringing in to her space at The Old Lucketts Store.***

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A Beautiful Find

This past week, we featured a lovely stained glass window on our Fresh Off the Wagon page which we update weekly.  Within minutes of taking the photo and posting the picture last Wednesday on our website, it sold.  It got me thinking of some of my favorites from one of our dealers, Robert, who specializes unique antiques and architectural elements, including doors and windows saved from historic buildings.  Here are a few favorites brought in and sold over the last few months...enjoy!

This was the beautiful stained glass window with a pond and cattails that came in the shop last week and left shortly thereafter with some lucky buyer. 

Robert offers a lot of re-purposed antique pieces.  This one caused a stir a few months back.  The old cast iron bathtub was split into two pieces and made into a pair of garden planters.

A beautiful hand carved mirror from the 1800s was offered back in April.

A unique piece from Robert - a vintage fireman's coat and hat.


And yet another unique piece - a window from the "Institute for Wayward Young Women".  I'm not sure where it is, but they sound like a fun bunch!

A beautiful example of a 1920's pair of carved stained glass doors - gorgeous!
 
Robert is really good at finding new uses for old pieces.  Here is an vintage piano backboard re-purposed with some vintage doorknobs into a one-of-a-kind chalkboard.

And last but not least, a laughing metal elephant lamp - he looks so happy. 
You can find Robert's unique finds at The Old Lucketts Store in the 2nd floor hallway, on the 3rd floor, and outside in his pavilion.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

What The Gerbil?! - LuckettStories

     So Sunday was a kind of quietish day this week, being Fathers Day and what not. Shopping at Lucketts is not usaully a fathers choice of tings to do, so thats cool, but sometime late in the morning Heather noticed something a little unusual sitting on the ground by the tree in the parking lot. What the heck is that! Well, for some reason, somebody left behind a gerbil in a cage. Okay, was that their gift to dad, that they would get rid of their gerbil for Fathers Day? I can even understand that, but I can't quite reconcile the thought process of how it ended up at our store. Let's look at the options.

Option 1 - You just so happened to be antiquing with your gerbil when him and his cage got sucked out of your window.

Option 2 - The gerbil was looking for something vintage to homey up his cage.

Option  3- Word out on the street is Lucketts Store is the place to be if you're a gerbil.

Okay, I'm out of ideas. So now we have a gerbil, what to do with it? Well the good news is we're all animal people, but enough already, we've had more than our fair share of stray cats, kittens, groundhogs, baby birds, and runaway dogs. We really didn't need to add a gerbil to our list of mascots. So we waited an hour or so hoping the "parents" would realize they might have missed someone, but alas no one showed. So we brought him into the lobby and put a, "Free To A Good Home" sign on his cage. Hours passed when a family with about five kids saw the little orphan and started begging their dad, just what he was hoping for on Fathers Day, a gerbil. All of his dreams were about to come true... He was their prisoner but held on to the time honored, "Ask your mother." Meanwhile, another family, who happened to be on their way to the pet store TO BUY A GERBIL, stopped in and saw the little fella. This family quickly decided to take advantage the opportunity, much to the chagrin of the other family's children. Fortunately, their ultra super hero dad said, "Okay, we can keep it" and the super nice "On their way to get a gerbil anyway" family relinquished.

So this gerbil story has a happy ending. The moral is - Dear God people don't leave your pets at the Old Lucketts Store. What the Gerbil?!

Sunday, June 19, 2011

A piano reincarnated

It's always wonderful to close the circle and see where our finds end up.  Recently, one of our marble top end tables made it all the way in to the Home Section of the New York Times.  This past week, one of our facebook friends, Erin N., shared some pictures of the desk she found at The Old Lucketts Store in its brand new home.  It's always so nice to see things come full circle, and rewarding for us to see how you are loving and using something we found and loved once too.

This desk was near and dear to our hearts. We featured it on our Fresh off the Wagon page a few weeks ago.  Its first incarnation was in the 1800's as a spinet piano.  Heather found it and loved its bones, but it was no longer functional as a piano.  That's when her handy husband reincarnated it, as a beautiful desk!  See how the desk looks in Erin's home in Washington, DC.  If you have pictures of how you've decorated with something found at the shop, please let us know!

Look at those lovely carved legs!
Ready for her new desk job!
The desk looks great in this corner with a collage of mirrors above it.
 
The new desk, looking happier than ever.


Thursday, June 16, 2011

NMW (Not My World!)

     When Amy and I go to shows, like High Point or Atlanta, they are filled with beautiful things for us to sort through and decide what will be cool in the next Design House. The look, quality, uniqueness, and price is what we look for and we feel pretty confident in what were doing.

     So this week, my son Wyatt and I travelled to San Diego to go to the largest internet retailing conference in the world. We hoped to learn everything we would need to know about the ins and outs of having an online store. Well, we walk into the giant conference center to encounter a sea of 10x10 booths with names like Aexiom, Liquid Pixels, Iksula, Optaros, Ixtens, Colinear, AFMS, Bilsi, Listrak, Certona, yea, I'm still naming them because there are 500 of them just like that... XPO, Accertify, Lotendo, Mobisus, OK, I'll stop. So we're really kind of just laughing to ourselves because we literally have absolutely no idea how to approach all of these bloodthirsty, smiling salesmen. We decide to head over the the help center for advice, where they couldn't have been any nicer and promptly signed us up for a private consultation.

 Our consultant then takes us over to a special little consulting table where we proceed to tell him our whole story, who we are, what our store is like, and what our vision is. All the while he is furiously scribbling lots of things down on his little sheet of paper, and keeps looking to us to keep talking (which I'll do all day long when prompted!) So then he says "Was that helpful?" I was wondering if this was kinda like therapy, where you tell your story for and hour and go home. It was all I could do to not get hysterical laughing because it was all so funny.... the entire scene. I was thinking, "was what helpful?" Fortunately, Wyatt is very kind and told the gentleman thank you, and assured him that it was indeed helpful.

     "Now what?" We thought, back to the Acadaca, Invesp, Upic, Invesp, Edgenet, DydaCorp, Padopolis.... All I knew was that this is NMW (not my world!) So we wandered, made eye contact with some reps and eventually headed to the beer booth before we called it a day. We went back to our condo to do some more research and begin thinking of a better direction and questions for the next day. Fortunately the day was saved when we found a hysterically fun piano bar called "Shout!"

     Unfortunately, we enjoyed "Shout!" a little too much yesterday and were both left a bit bleary eyed today. But Wyatt was ready for one of the software companies and while he talked to them, I had high hopes for another shot at the help desk. I wandered over and a woman was promptly right there, offering another consultation. I thought, "What the hell?" So I told her my plight and how difficult it was to navigate through the mindless array of identically named companies. She said, "Oh I could never navigate through this." "Yea, and none of them are even very cute," I responded. "Well don't pick one because it's cute... So was I helpful to you?"

Umm...

Bronto, Certona, Zoony, Venda.... Corona!!

P.S. All of the kooky names we mentioned are real companies from the conference

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

LuckettStories - Da Bomb

We've had such an insane amount of funny and crazy stories over the years that it doesn't even make sense. We've been told many times that we need our own sitcom or at least to write this stuff down somewhere. So we're going to start now - we're gonna dig deep and bring to you all of the most ridiculous ones we can remember. So here we go with our first weekly post from our collection of LuckettStories!

Da Bomb 

Thursday night was always my auction night, my husband would take the kids and I was completely free for the entire evening. I would head to Cochran's Auction and spend every minute of the evening alongside the auctioneer, so I wouldn't miss anything that might fall through the cracks. Every bowl, bottle, antique toy and anything else I could afford with that certain "look," I bought. This particular evening there were lots of toys - kiddie microscopes, biology sets, and some old fashioned chemistry sets with pretty bottles and really cool labels. As always I bought it all, boxed it up, threw it in my rusty old van and headed home. The next morning I hastily threw all these boxes on the ground to make room for my kids car seats, and ran them up to their A.M preschool. After returning home, I tossed the boxes back into the van and headed to my store, My Wits End, that's just up the road from Lucketts.
That day I spent unpacking my newfound treasures, cleaning them up, pricing them, and artfully displaying them throughout my little shop. Proud at my productive days work, I could finally head home.

A day or two had passed when a customer came in and showed a keen interest in the old chemistry set, much to my delight. He asked, "Do you know what you have here ma'am?" Excited by his tone, I figured I might have finally found something worth a lot of $. "No," I said, "but I love the shape of the bottles and the pretty labels, I think it's probably from the 1940's or 50's." "Yes, your probably right about the time frame, but this bottle here is [blah blah acid] and over time it oxidizes and becomes very volatile...like a bomb. I'm a bomb squad guy from Fairfax County and this bottle could explode from the slightest vibration, even as slight as someone opening or closing your front door." Freaked out and realizing how much I had already carelessly thrown the bottle around, I asked what I should do. "We're going to need to call in the bomb squad and have them detonate the bottle."


Seriously, I wish I could make this stuff up, but here's what happened next... We gently left the shop (making sure to put up the closed sign) and called the bomb squad, who also freaked out. They quickly brought out their entire detonation unit, had a man in full bomb squad armor bring out the bottle, and detonated it in a local field! In the process they closed off route 15 for almost the entire evening and earned my unknown little shop a spot on the 6 o'clock news.

Lessons learned? Pay attention in chemistry class OR only buy pretty bottles that are empty, cause 15 minutes of fame is highly overrated.

Monday, June 13, 2011

A Timely mention

We were super-psyched last week when we got a call from a woman in New York who tipped us off that one of our finds had made it to a farm outside Pittsburgh, PA, and then all the way into the front page article in the New York Times Home section on Thursday, June 9th!

The article was called The Decorated Shed, and it featured the story of a couple who bought a farm in Pennsylvania as a weekend retreat.  After many years of growing crops and donating them to local food banks, they decided it was time to redecorate the farm (that's where we come in).  Designer Lisa Dagnal purchased one of our marble side tables at our shop in Virginia and decorated Esther Dormer's bedroom.  A scan of the front page of the article and of our mention (see caption for picture #6) are shown below.

This article was featured on the front cover of the New York Times Home section on June 9th, 2011.

I know you probably can't read it, but the picture on the bottom right is a picture of our marble top table's new home.  The caption reads "the marble-top side table is from the Old Lucketts Store in Leesburg, VA".
A special thank you shout out to my sister Amy and her other half, Dave, for running out to the newsstand in the pouring rain and snapping up a copy and mailing it to me the next day!  <3

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Boredom and a Blank Wall

The shop was a little quiet Sunday morning.  There would have been a lot to do, except that Heather is an early riser and gets to the shop two hours before it opens, which means the shop is already swept, the music is on, and everything has been given a once (or twice) over already by the time I get there.

Today's project involved sprucing up the entryway.  Our dear friend Ted passed away last month and he used to occupy the front room.  As his last few items are being sold, we were left with a blank wall.  We really wanted to hang the water buffalo head - it's beautiful and eye catching, except the water buffalo literally took a nose dive earlier this week, and did a job on his nose, so he wouldn't work.  So, we decided to have some fun and pick things out from around the shop.  Here are the results...

The main focus of the wall is a piece by Alice & Jay which is an art piece made of found metal objects.  This one includes a framed teapot with wire "tea" spilling out.

We picked a few round elements like this tin flower-petal mirror, a round distressed tin piece and antique wooden architectural pieces.


Here's a closeup of some of the uniquely shaped tin pieces we used and one of the round architectural elements.


This piece of tin looks like a snowflake to me.  And with the weather we've been having, I'll gladly welcome a snowflake in June.


Here's the final wall.  We added the word CREATE in tin.  Of course we ran out of the letter "E" so we improvised with some upside down 3s.  It was also kind of wonky standing on a ladder perched on stairs so the letters weren't perfectly in a row --- but hey, that's part of the fun.  The grey piece to the left of the artwork is actually a chalkboard!  It looks like a chandelier crystal to me and I thought the unique shape worked well with the other pieces.
A case of boredom cured!  Thanks for looking.

Friday, June 10, 2011

June isn't just for hydrangeas...

Photo: Van Chaplin for Southern Living
Thumbing through some June issues of my favorite magazines, I saw one common theme - everyone is featuring hydrangeas, again.  Yes, they're beautiful, and yes, I love them.  But when I started to look through an issue of a magazine that shall remain nameless, I saw a picture that I loved, and then... the rocky path looked familiar, and then the hydrangeas spilling out over the wooden crate started to look familiar too.  I ran to my stack of back issues and saw the same pictures in two old issues, cropped slightly differently, but the same photos.  I'm well aware that magazines reuse content, but I thought we could feature some other flowers for June, besides hydrangeas. Any time I think flowers or garden style, I think of one of our dealers, Mary Lou, who is always using flowers for her signature garden style.


Large elements like shutters, garden tables, benches, and doors, like the oversized "chippy" example here, are some of Mary Lou's signature pieces.  She greens up the room with urns filled with topiaries and ivy.

Mary Lou adds pops of color to her vignettes, like these red and yellow poppies.

Here's a garden bench Mary Lou had made from a headboard and foot board --- perfect for relaxing in the garden.

I love this worn shutter.  These are always reasonably priced in Mary Lou's room and pavilion outside.  The large size quickly adds a lot of character to a space.  And hooray - more bright floral touches!

Here's an oversized potting table.  Mary Lou loves painted furniture as well.

More of Mary Lou's style.  This garden table is on sale for $179 this week.

Mary Lou makes wonderful handmade wreaths.  This one looks great against this lavender door. 
(and they smell great too)
And wait several weeks...those hydrangeas that are blooming now in Mary Lou's garden will be dried, bundled, and available at the shop!  Discover Mary Lou's finds on the second floor of the shop or outside in her pavilion.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Spring Market 2011 - Even More Pics

Here are a few more shots of the 2011 Spring Market I just found sitting on my computer.  We had a beautiful weekend.  Thanks for joining us.  Enjoy!


Check out our fence around the entrance gate, so creative!  Instead of rope or ugly orange fence, we used colorful vintage bicycles fastened together.
 
I love how the natural light bounced off all of these beads in these fantastic bracelets from Findings at Summerhouse.
 
The birds living in this house must be so happy to live among all of these grape crushing barrels and these vintage French wine bottles.

Beautiful wooden table with classic urns.

 
Here was our eating area - the before.  The tables were adorned with rosemary topiaries and sea shells. 

A pile of great metal finds, including a metal top trunk.

This tent was stocked full of eye-popping vintage textiles.

I call this one the "happy dresser" just because it's so springy and cheerful.

The Beekeeper's Cottage had this huge bed in their tent.  I wonder how many people wanted to fall back on this one after a day's worth of shopping.

Mason jars full of vintage buttons -- only a few dollars each!

This piece had such great bones!

Our little trailer was decked out, complete with grill and a pink flamingo.  The admission to peek inside of this retro camper was only a smile.