When Robin Buxbaum found herself “homeless” 2 1/2 years ago, she had to find a house not only for herself and her family, but also for three semitrailer truckloads of her antiques and collections. Her “pin fruit,” sequin-covered imitations of the real thing, alone filled 20 boxes.
She had been settled in, moving again not an option, until a stranger knocked on the door of her former Highland Park home. Before opening the door, she intuitively knew what it was, an offer to buy her 100-year-old house on a lake bluff. The house she had spent 10 years renovating was not on the market, but it was an offer too generous to refuse.
Which was how she found herself checking out real estate, says Buxbaum, who opened the original Antiques on Old Plank Road eight years ago and a second antiques store two months ago. Both Westmont stores are sources for fabulous hot finds in French, English, Scottish and Irish originals and reproductions in furniture, decorative accessories and garden ornaments.
Well into her house search, a friend urged her to look at Orren Pickell Builders’ The Entertainment House, a 5,855-square-foot European manor home designed for a family looking for the ultimate in home-entertainment options. Finished in April 1997, it was a yearlong showhouse, flaunting a spectacular layout and custom floor plan, the latest in electronics, including a 12-seat theater with a 85-by-48-inch picture screen in the 2,000-square-foot lower level, a built-in entertainment system featuring three television monitors, illuminated art niches, a state-of-the-art sound system and a computerized lighting system to set the perfect mood in any room.
Buxbaum thinks she was the only person in Highland Park who had not been in the showhouse. “What do I want a new house for? I have all these antiques,” Buxbaum protested.
Once seen, however, The Entertainment House really appealed to her. “I like overscale. And this house has great bones for antiques, good for oversized furniture. It was neutral and everything [in it] worked.”
She packed every day from May to September, moving that month in 1998. It took her two months to unpack, even with the help of employees from her store. “I will never do that again,” she vows.
“All my furniture went in well,” she says. “Most of the stuff I had in my other house. It was just rearranged,” says Buxbaum, leaning against her kitchen island stacked with pyramids of pin fruit in a medley of glittery colors.
Dreams of France
In a house of beautiful rooms, the kitchen in the rear turret of the house takes the cake for its warmth and its U-shaped layout that opens to the adjoining family room. “It’s great because you can cook and still entertain,” Buxbaum says, though she indulges seldom.
“I come home to relax. I think this house has a really nice feeling that way,” she says of her new home, though she still needs cheat sheets to understand the electronics.
There’s a feeling of French architectural nostalgia here in ceilings a lofty 10-feet-high and cabinets finished with a whitewash over a honey glaze.
“I like the idea the cabinetry looks like furniture, almost like the antiques we sell for an unfitted kitchen,” Buxbaum says. French antiques are the mainstay of her business.
The new 32,000-square-foot store, which took on the original shop’s name, Antiques on Old Plank Road, is only eight blocks from the first one on Ogden Avenue, that one having been renamed Old Plank Brocante. But they are much farther apart in what they offer. The new store offers authentic higher-end wares; the old 8,000-square-foot store will carry the lesser-priced items–brocante being a word with the connotation of “less fancy” in French.
One of her French finds that she kept for herself is an old butcher block with a deep wave in it from the constant cleaving of meats, decorated with the awards won by the butcher. It’s a scene-stealer at the end of the island in her kitchen. Buxbaum took out a granite table to install the block, the only alteration she made to the house. “All it did was attract pin fruit,” she says of the table with a laugh.
Buxbaum has 1,000 or so pieces of pin fruit, pin birds and pin vegetables, scattered throughout the house. This hot collectible first appeared, it is believed, in the 1940s, made of a brightly colored composition material, similar to Styrofoam, but more dense, onto which beads are stuck and fastened with a pin. Later pieces have been covered with sequins.
Asked what it is about pin fruit she likes so much, she says, “maybe because it is something it is not supposed to be.”
Other things she collects appeal to her on the same basis, she says, like the 1970s table with a base of antlers, antler chandeliers, a table with a cattle-horn base, pine tables cut down to coffee-table height.
A recent find for her was the French “art of rustication,” loglike furniture made of concrete that was originally used in the mid-1800s in outdoor cafes and roadside picnic areas. Besides the selection in her shop, Buxbaum enjoys it at home, outdoors as well as in. Because her entry/foyer “reminded me of all the sunrooms I ever had,” she says, she put her best rustication pieces there, opposite the front door.
Only the best
Her interest is wide-ranging, but whatever it is, from elegant French Art Deco club chairs in the master bedroom to an ornately carved, floor-to-ceiling antique French wedding armoire in the family room, she has sought out the best of each genre.
She organizes a lot of her collections in the armoires, cupboards and cabinets. An old English pie safe with original blue-green paint is thus employed in an upstairs bedroom, along with a smaller English armoire with a tiny carved wood hand at the top that swivels to hold the doors closed.
Many upholstered pieces throughout the house are done in a small leopard print, helping to tie things together.
Daughter Ashley’s bedroom has the feel of a European garret, with much of the room taken up by a massive American Victorian carved oak bed. The headboard was painted with the portraits of two pet cats by her grandmother when the now 20-year-old was a child. An antique fireplace mantel placed between two doors is nonworking, merely for show, installed “to even the score,” says Buxbaum, with the real one in twin Lauren’s room. A large painting of a sheep over the mantel, with painted metal cats lounging on the hearth, add to the coziness.
Actually, this could be redubbed “The Accessory House”: There are so many objects to look at–from a French reverse-painted glass featuring a sheaf of wheat to a large grouping of framed French botanicals on the opposite. Buxbaum has the gift of making each piece seem custom-made for the space in which it is found, but she says the effect is serendipitious, a result of pushing things around until they work.
Buxbaum takes her visitor to the lower level, into which she has fitted the entire furnishings of a house she once owned in Downers Grove. While the upstairs is sleek, traditional, worldly, downstairs we see the part of her personality drawn to the naive, the folky, the primitive. There is too much to catalog, but a collection of wood sculpture by Jerzy Kenar dominates, including blond-wood tables, a fireplace mantel, bench, various bowls and the massive headboard of a bed, carved overall with reindeer, rams, buffaloes and other creatures for son Jason, 25, who now runs Old Plank Brocante.
Finders keepers
“She is a true collector,” says Stefano Marchetti, the designer who helped Buxbaum put together her Downers Grove house. “Once it is hers, it stays in her house forever. The things we purchased together, she still has. They went from house to house.”
“It is everything I like,” she says of the diversity of it all.. “When you like something, you can make it all work together.”
Any kind of master plan?
“I just like good design. If it is good design, I think it goes together,” she says. “I told you the oversized part of it. And Orren used the one color throughout, to make it flow.”
When Buxbaum opened her shop in 1992, after all her children were in college, it was the realization of a life’s desire. And an opportunity to do a lot more shopping–although she had to learn to buy in large quantities, she says.
Now she’s expanded her business into new areas. Her new store offers such services as the design and fitting of French country-style kitchens and installation of home movie theaters.
Buxbaum’s taste does not differ whether it’s for her clients, her stores or herself. “I go shopping and if I see something that works [for the house], it never makes it to the store,” she says.
“I’m always looking. I never stop,” she adds. “There’s always excitement in the hunt, and there’s always something you’ve never seen before that makes it all worthwhile.”
The Entertainment House worked out for Buxbaum in more ways than one. “I’ve actually gotten customers for the store because of this house,” she says. “After I bought it, it was used as a showhouse six times on an appointment basis by Pickell Builders. It worked for both of us.”
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Robin Buxbaum’s Antiques on Old Plank Road store is at 331 E. Ogden Ave. in Westmont, 630-887-1995; Old Plank Brocante is at 233 W. Ogden Ave., 630-971-0500.
