Little Things Mean a Lot: A Passionate Decorator Finds Joy in Things Others Have Used

Apr. 7--A couple of years ago, Mary Lea Bradford moved from a big house to a little house that needed some TLC.

The 1950s ranch in Buena Vista didn't reflect the way Bradford lived or her eclectic taste. So she set out to redo it. But she didn't want to just go out and buy a bunch of new stuff. She wanted to salvage what she tore out and reuse it. She wanted to fill the house with items that once had another life.

The house is still a work in progress. But she has rescued, reused and repurposed building materials and furnishings to create a home that is uniquely hers. Bradford is a garden designer, but her creative streak extends to interiors, too.

In her living room, shelves that flank the fireplace hang in front of bead board salvaged from the kitchen, which she stripped down to the studs. Hands and a head from department-store mannequins prop up books. She posed one hand to look as if it were plucking the strings of her childhood violin.

"I don't mind if things look a little creepy," she said.

A haughty mannequin head wearing a festive headdress oversees the dining room. She holds her head high, with her chin tilted, and life blazes in her blue eyes. Cracks in her fine white skin reveal a dark surface beneath. Bradford pleated fabric taken from her grandmother's old sheer curtains to make a ruffled collar and decorated the mannequin's neck with her grandmother's necklace. The figurine sits upon a square terra-cotta pot covered with moss.

"I love her," Bradford said.

Beneath a fine table that she bought at an antique store, she placed an old spool table with mottled green paint. "I like it tucked under there," she said.

Beside the sofa stands a worn end table with white-painted legs and a natural wood top that she bought for $10. It holds a collection of items both rough and smooth, refined and rustic. They include an etched-glass bowl, a collection of speckled quail eggs in a pink Depression-glass cup, a paper fortune from a cookie and a beach rock shaped like a heart.

Another collection -- a faceted glass doorknob, Bradford's white baby shoes and a framed baby photo -- sits atop a wire box sprayed with moss beneath the table.

Bradford took bits of fabric -- a border from a kimono, a piece of an Indian sari and a swatch of silk -- to make a sofa pillow. She took an aqua-colored stool that came from a textile mill in Massachusetts and gave it a place of honor in the living room.

"I love to look at these things as though they have a story to tell me," she said. "I don't know it, so I make it up." She uses another piece from the mill, an old wooden locker painted aqua with a natural wood top, as an end table in her den.

Bradford haunts Habitat for Humanity ReStores in every city she visits, and her house is filled with Habitat finds. She paid $2 a roll for the floral wallpaper in her dining room. The paper came in six dye lots, each slightly different. The workman who installed it arranged the paper so that the color gradation seemed almost like a progression, Bradford said.

Bradford ripped everything out of the kitchen, but she had workmen save as much of the original pine paneling and cabinetry as they could. She took up the kitchen floor, beige with gold and avocado medallions. Dark green cabinets are interspersed with ones made from pine. Mismatched knobs from the ReStore serve as pulls on kitchen drawers.

Between the kitchen and the den, an old turquoise-colored cabinet that came out of the carport at her former home hangs on a wall and holds a collection of Depression glass.

"I usually am attracted to things by their color," Bradford said.

Color, an unusual shade of green, led her to snap up a toilet, bathtub and pair of sinks for $60 at the local ReStore. The fixtures, made of porcelain atop cast iron, were in perfect condition, she said. And she loved the color, which she described as the shade of green that leaves show when they first open.

"I am a green freak," she said. "Green is the color of the heart chakra." In yoga, chakras are energy centers in the body that correspond to spiritual or psychological qualities. She paired the leaf green with bronze fixtures.

She sank the bathroom sink into an old table that she had cut apart and put back together. The original top forms a shelf at the bottom. She used some of the old pine from the kitchen to make a new top. The whole thing is bolted to the bathroom wall.

"It is the sum of its parts," she said.

Tumbled tiles that form a border on the bathroom wall and travertine marble that forms a chair rail came from a ReStore in Orlando, Fla. An old headboard, covered in peeling pink paint that shows dark wood beneath, hangs on one wall. Bradford found it in a trash heap. Pale pink and ivory towels hang beneath it.

Bradford has sprinkled other finds throughout the rest of the house. She loves children's chairs, and she uses them as accent pieces in several rooms. In the den, a reconditioned rotary phone from Argentina, cream and red, sits atop the old locker. A gilded and reupholstered chair that once belonged to Bradford's grandmother stands across the room.

An old table, 15-to-18 feet long, stretches across her new back porch. "I wanted the porch wall long enough for it," she said. Someday, she would like to serve Thanksgiving dinner on it, she said.

A half-moon table, too short to suit her purposes when it stood on its legs, hangs on the wall at one end of the hall. Near the other end, a mirror with much of its silver backing worn off, reflects ghostly images.

She took a sentimental shine to a box made from an orange turned inside out and dried. The rind on the inside looks like leather. The box reminds her of her native Florida.

And she is especially attached to a yardstick from an old plant store, which she keeps hanging in her den. The yardstick is square, not flat.

"I wouldn't take a million dollars for it," she said. "I couldn't get another one."

As she looks around, she sees history everywhere.

"I've become so conscious," she said. "Who touched this thing before I touched it? How many hands did it go through?"

-- Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at

jgaston@wsjournal.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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