Have you ever walked into a shop and been totally trans­ported to another place? I know it sounds cheesy. Trans­ported you say? Come on. It’s a shop. Well, there are shops and there are SHOPS.
The first time I walked into MacKenzie~Childs, a home shop on W 57th street in Man­hat­tan, I remem­ber think­ing, Oh, I’ll be com­ing back here.

A cross between Robin­son Crusoe’s Tree­house and Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hat­ter Tea party, except more whacked out. In a good way.

As soon as you walk in the door, you are swept up into some­thing out of a child’s fairy tale but not so pink and sparkly. All the reg­u­lar things that you would nor­mally find in a house were there. Tables, chairs couches, chests, tea cups & saucers, can­dle­sticks, pil­lows, lamps and chick­ens in a coop. Ah, yes, I said chick­ens in a coop. Now from what I remem­ber, they were exotic chick­ens in a hand painted, finely-made coop. On a pedestal.

Hand painted is what MacKenzie~Childs is all about. Almost every­thing is hand painted in a mosaic of pat­tern and color, tex­ture and light, mod­ern and mumsy. If it is not painted, it is uphol­stered in vibrant mixes of color and over-the-top detail­ing of tas­sels and cord. A menagerie of ceramic ani­mals peek out their lit­tle noses from the bases of tables, chests and chairs. Pas­toral scenes are stretched across the bowed front of Bom­bay chests.

Armoires open up into fully oper­a­tional mini-kitchens-perfect for the New York apart­ment.  Fan­ci­ful fish are used as the slats on the back of chairs. Can­dle­sticks, teapots, serv­ing plat­ters et al, are embell­ished within an inch of their still-lives.
You have to see it to believe it. In the last sev­eral years, MacKenzie~Childs has branched out into some higher end malls.  Not quite the same over­whelm­ing aes­thetic as their flag­ship store in NYC, which is to be expected, yet, still worth the visit. They also have a web­site and cat­a­log that I love to flip through.

I returned to the store numer­ous times on week­end walk-abouts and made it a des­ti­na­tion with vis­i­tors. I never bought a thing at that NY store.

Yes, I am one of THOSE, cus­tomers. I could never fig­ure out what I “needed”. It was pretty pricey and I couldn’t imag­ine just hav­ing “A” piece. It seemed like you needed lots of it to cre­ate the drama. But I was wrong.

When they opened up a shop in Atlanta I finally bought some MacKenzie~Childs. I bought knobs and han­dles for my closet.  As many New York­ers and trans­planted New York­ers ( like me) know, a large closet is the clos­est thing to Nir­vana. I hap­pen to have a very small mas­ter bed­room with a huge walk in closet. I don’t have any use­ful chest of draw­ers in my room because — every­thing is in my closet. I am blessed. A cho­rus of angels sing when I open the door…LAAAAAAAAA!

I digress. So, like I said, I bought some knobs. Sounds lame, I know. But think about it, what place do you wake up and see every morn­ing. What else could dress up bor­ing, ster­ile, white melamine draw­ers and doors? Hand painted, swirly, check­ered, flow­ered knobs– that’s what. At $22 a pop, pricey, yes. I could have had bur­nished, pewter stain­less steel, domed knobs for a buck-fifty, but that would not be any fun.

There are a lot of dec­o­ra­tor items that I love that are not really my style or would not fit in with my décor. Some­times because of price or because it is just too over the top, I have to visit objects of my affec­tion in their nat­ural retail habi­tat. If I really love an item, I make a men­tal note and sooner or later it usu­ally sur­faces in an A-HA! moment of how I can get just a taste of it in my home.

Now, every­time I open my closet…. LAAAAAAA!…I remem­ber that lit­tle shop in New York and how much fun I had look­ing at every­thing, like a kid in a candy shop. I wanted piece and now I have some.