nesting like it's 1899

My friends at The Wren's Nest have been really busy over the past year with an incredible conservation project. You can read all about it on their blog, and you can see the amazing photos Jonathan Hillyer took of some of the completed interior rooms here. Here is Hillyer's shot of the living room, which became my instant favorite room in the house the very first time I visited (for this story).

It's mostly the funky tree-print wallpaper that did it for me, but also that great marble-topped side table (with the glass lamp on it) you can see in the back left corner there. It was ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog, I was told, like much of the furniture in the house—so that probably means that the exact same table, which sits in my parents' own living room, which came from my great uncle's house after he died, probably came from Sears, too.

It occurs to me that, one day in the future, our generation's grand-progeny will be comparing their families' antiques with strangers and new friends and will be weirdly thrilled and amused to discover, "Oh, wow, I inherited that exact same birch Expedit from my great-great-great aunt Rachael! Yeah, I guess it was like a big thing to get furniture from that Ikea place or whatever." And then the things will all disintegrate into a poof of 100-year-old particleboard.

Oh well.

In the meantime, if you're in Atlanta and you haven't visited The Wren's Nest, you really should. They've been doing some really great things over there for a while, but now they're doing it all in super-spiffy historically-preserved style.