'Old is better': Welcome to the embellished world of a flea-market maven

Chicago Tribune (MCT) - You drive and drive. Past pumpkin farms and silos. And then, at last, when the country road bumps into, yes, a street plainly called Main _ where an old-fashioned barber pole still twirls and the steeple of an old white country church is the tallest point around _ you turn, hard left as you can. Keep coming south across the bridge to downtown, then look for the black-and-white striped awning on Broadway that will tell you you've arrived.

Climb up two steps and through the old, old door painted the very color of the Campbell's tomato soup your mama might have made for you on a day when you needed cheering, and suddenly you will understand why you just clocked all those miles, and why suddenly you feel oh-so-very cheered.

Welcome to the embellished world of flea-market maven Maxine Guli, a self-taught wunderkind who always sees the buried treasure in other people's trash. An interior designer for the last 12 years, with clients up and down Chicago's North Shore area, Guli has been traipsing through thrift stores ever since her dairy-farmer grandpa took her up into his padlocked attic, where every last inch, even the rafters, was packed with old treasure upon even-older treasure _ each one with a story he loved to tell.

And just this September, in part to make a little breathing room for her own ever-expanding collection, Guli opened Embellish, a jewel-box of a shop where, now, you too can reap the resurrected treasures she's culled from thrift stores and trash heaps here and there and everywhere between.

Every single something that Guli sells has had a spin through what you might call the Maxine-Old-Thing-Embellishing Spa. She's spiffed it up in countless ways. Brought back pink to its wan and tired cheeks. Massaged a little oomph into worn and weary edges.

Or, as she says, her thinking goes like this when she spies the odd, old, discarded Something: "Now, that's a cool thing. Maybe it has a great shape, maybe it's really functional. How can I change it? I can't paint and I can't draw, so what can I do to embellish every bit of it?"

It's almost as if she has super-duper eyes, and she can see things you or I might not. Once inspired, she gets to work with her tool kit, housed in a neat-as-a-pin basement that's lined with rows and rows of shelves groaning under paint cans and decades-old decals and bolts of vintage ribbons and trims and cottons and velvets. Glue guns rule. And a scrub sink and ironing board stand at attention. A battalion of helpers are ever on-call: an upholsterer, a seamstress, a refinisher who Guli swears is a magician, and, best of all, her aunt, Janet Cooper, who can do anything and everything and is a wizard with math, besides.

It all started, says Guli, with her paternal grandpa, Ray Cooper, who farmed for 50 years near Richmond, along the Illinois-Wisconsin border, back when Guli, who is now 43, was a little girl. Every summer, she came from Phoenix, where her mama had moved, to stay with her father and grandfather. Her grandpa lived in an old farmhouse with an attic at the tippy-top of "skinny, straight-up stairs," Guli recalls. "If you fell, you broke your neck."

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The door to the attic was locked. "A giant padlock dangled from the door, and there were treasures inside and we knew it," she says. "I'd hound my grandpa all summer, 'Let me in the attic.'" Her grandpa, one of 12 children, had been a lifetime collector. Of anything and everything. Fountain pens. Hand-forged nails. Dairy fair ribbons. Baby cribs. You name it.

"At the end of the summer, he'd say, 'All right, we're going up in the attic and you can take home whatever you want that you can find up there.' We'd be up there for eight hours. It was really a history lesson. He knew the story behind every single object and if he didn't, he'd make it up. He'd tell me all about its lineage.

"It was really about spending time up in the attic, alone with my grandpa. I didn't have to share him with anyone on the days we climbed to the attic."

And it was up there, at her grandpa's side, at the tippy-top of the skinny straight-up stairs, that Guli learned this lifelong lesson: Old nearly always is better than new. Because, as she sees it: "It's made better, it has history, and the human hand has touched it."

It's what brings layers of meaning _ and heart _ to a room.

"Anybody," she says, "can walk into The (Merchandise) Mart, anybody can walk into TJ Maxx, but not everyone can walk into a junk store and see the potential in someone else's castoffs."

But to Guli, that is the thrill of it all. And she's put that knack to good use ever since she carried home her first tea tin from her grandpa's attic and thus began a collection that now fills four warehouses, and spills into the aptly named storefront, where not a single castoff suffers from its spin through the Old Thing Embellisher.

Because Guli herself has a big, big heart, and because the way she sees it, there's more than enough old stuff for everyone, she walked us through her treasure chest and gave us tips galore so you, too, can try your hand at the Fine Old Art of Embellishing.

You can find Embellish at 5603 W. Broadway in Richmond, Ill., 815-678-2386. Or visit embellishonbroadway.com.

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GULI'S TIPS

Old hankies are "works of art in themselves," says Guli. By mistake, she discovered that a tubload of old linens can spend the night soaking in a bottle of bleach, and come morning, the stains are gone and the colors still vivid. She's a fanatic about ironing out every wrinkle, then she cuts fusible webbing (found at fabric stores) to match the hankie, then irons it straight onto a 12-by-12-inch canvas (they're really cheap at any craft store, and usually sold in packs of two). Hang a whole row on your wall. Or maybe four in a rectangle. Prom dress takes another spin

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What little girl wouldn't swoon to wake up to a frilly pink prom dress dancing on her wall? All it takes is a dress you love (or maybe even your wedding veil would inspire you, or your little girl's first frock). Just iron and safety-pin it carefully to a canvas. Hang on the wall. Swoon.

"Not everyone can walk into a junk store and see the potential in someone else's castoffs," says Guli. To her, that is the thrill of it all. She has even taken vintage crib box springs and scrubbed and painted them; then, she hangs them on the wall for a one-of-a-kind backdrop for hanging vintage plates. Old shutters can serve the same purpose.

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