Old Treasures Add New Luster
Every bit and bauble has a story behind it. And even if Carol Orr can’t track it down exactly, she likes to imagine what it might be.
“I just love picturing someone using these. You know, the little girls in that era, brushing their hair? ” says Orr, holding forth a decorative vanity set she guesses to be from the 1920s. “It’s like the life I would have wanted.”
She sets it down on a table in her downtown New Haven shop, then empties the contents of a plastic bag — a mound of colorful vintage scarves, her find from a North Haven estate sale earlier that Friday morning.
“It was all 1950s. I bought almost the entire house,” she laughs. “It’s being delivered on Sunday. I’ve got three truckloads coming. Wacky stuff.”
There’s still plenty of room for the haul in the yawning, exposed-brick space on lower Chapel Street that Orr, a landscape architect by training, has transformed with designer Maria Freda into The English Building Markets. Artfully stuffed with eclectic furniture, antique rugs, glass trinkets, chandeliers and the like, the shop — just like its quirky wares — is an unexpected find on this stretch of low-end retail and empty storefronts trying for a comeback.
Yet, this business of scouting-then-selling the lovely and unusual was decidedly not the plan when Orr bought the three-story building at 839 Chapel St. four years ago with her husband, architect Robert Orr.
