Three Generations, One Hall Tree—and a New Look Every Season

Some pieces of furniture simply occupy a room. This one has been part of our family.

The hall tree first belonged to my grandmother, then my mother, and eventually came to me. Three generations have lived with it, which means I could never look at it as simply an old piece of furniture. It carries part of our family’s history with it.

And a little piece of my mother is still there. The figurine I keep on the hall tree belonged to her, and along with the lights, it has become part of the way the hall tree normally looks in our home.

But that doesn’t mean I treat it like a museum piece.

One of my favorite things about the hall tree is decorating it throughout the year. The carved wood, mirror, hooks, seat and all those wonderful old details give me a completely different backdrop every season.

In fall, it becomes a backdrop for autumn leaves, warm lights and scarecrows. By Christmas, the same old piece has changed again with greenery, snowmen and all the little things that make the season feel like Christmas at our house.

The hall tree stays.
The story around it keeps changing.

Christmas on Gingerbread Street

The hall tree isn’t the only old piece around here that gets pulled into my seasonal decorating. At Christmas, the Hoosier cabinet becomes something else entirely.

By the time I’m finished, the cabinet has become my own little Gingerbread Street—gingerbread people, a village, lights, snow and a North Pole Bake Shop all tucked into and around an old piece of furniture that spends the rest of the year looking entirely different.

That’s one of the things I enjoy most about decorating our home. Old furniture doesn’t have to be frozen in time. I can appreciate the character of a piece and still have an unreasonable amount of fun turning it into a gingerbread village for Christmas.

Turning a Guest Room Into a Cabinet of Curiosities

This one is still very much a work in progress, which may be exactly why I’m enjoying it so much.

Apparently, I wasn’t finished with it.

Over time the room changed, but the biggest transformation began when I decided I wanted it to feel less like an ordinary guest room and more like an old collector’s retreat—a place filled with natural history, exploration, curious objects and things that make you stop for a second look.

And, as usually happens around here, one idea led to another.

When I Couldn’t Find It, I Started Designing It

There was never a master shopping list for this room. In fact, some of what I wanted simply didn’t exist—at least not quite the way I pictured it.

So I started designing it myself.

I began creating artwork around the idea of an old collector’s room: natural-history specimens, exploration, antique scientific instruments, maps and curious objects that looked as though they might have been gathered over a lifetime.

Some of those designs eventually became the artwork, pillows and woven throw you see throughout the room. They are pieces I designed as part of the Cabinet of Curiosities collection for Lace & Grit—but this room is also where many of those ideas came to life.

That may be my favorite part of this project. The room began influencing the things I was designing, and the things I designed began influencing the room.

I would work on a design and think, That belongs in the room. Then I’d change something in the room and find myself thinking, That needs to become a design. Somewhere along the way, the two became part of the same story.

Sometimes the Best Part Is Figuring Out What Something Could Become

The old eight-pane window gave me another opportunity to create something specifically for the room.

Rather than filling the panes with photographs or leaving the window empty, I designed eight individual specimen studies specifically for it, each with the feel of an old naturalist’s record.

A preserved butterfly, chambered nautilus, antique brass microscope, emerald dragonfly, armillary sphere, amethyst geode, ancient clay oil lamp and apothecary balance scale each found their own pane.

What started as an old window became one of my favorite features in the room—and something I couldn’t have found in a store because it was created specifically for this space.

Use Things in Unexpected Ways

Part of the fun of creating a Cabinet of Curiosities room is forgetting what something is supposed to be used for.

I have wall-mounted candle holders in the room, but there isn’t a candle on either one. Instead, one holds an ethically sourced raccoon bone and another an ethically sourced iguana paw. And, because apparently those weren’t quite enough, an ethically sourced rabbit skull is on its way.

A little odd? Absolutely.
But that’s rather the point.

You don’t need an actual antique curiosity cabinet to create the feeling of one. Sometimes an ordinary object becomes far more interesting when you give it a completely unexpected job.

That’s really how this room has come together—not by buying everything at once, but by layering old pieces, things I’ve changed myself, curiosities I’ve collected and artwork I’ve designed until the room gradually began telling the story I had in my head.

It is still evolving. There are pieces to finish, things to hang and, judging by recent history, probably another slightly strange object headed for my mailbox.

And I’m in no hurry to call it finished.

Half the fun has been watching the room become
what I imagined, one project at a time.