STORY OF A HOUSE More is more!

STORYof a house MORE MORE! IS At home with Charlotte Smith

by JESMA REYNOLDS

photographs by CATHERINE NGUYEN

IIn Charlotte Smith’s world, more is always better. More art, more accessories, more color, more furniture. The owner of Raleigh’s two-year-old Union Camp Collective sells an unconventional mix of wares out of her large shop/warehouse on West Street. There, her more-is-more approach reigns supreme. Rooms are choc-a-block full of modern vintage furniture, fine antiques, large-scale art, and funky garden sets. It’s also an event space that Smith offers up for parties, film screenings, and other gatherings. The bind that ties it all is a combination of variety and audacity that she applies with skill at her personal residence as well.

On a side street in the University Park neighborhood, Smith’s rental house is a laboratory for experiments in color, arrangement, scale, and style. Ever-changing – price tags remain on most of the furniture and accessories – the rooms are a bricolage of things picked up on buying trips or inherited from family members. The result is a mash-up of motifs, periods, and styles. Furniture pairings are fierce, or, as she’s prone to say about pretty much everything in her house, badass. Within that framework, one might find a chair from India with a Native American headrest beside an antique gilt French side table, or a collection of custom-framed antique fans from her mother lining the walls of the dining room.

It all seems pretty fabulous, but it’s the art she treasures most. Smith claims if a fire did strike and she were forced to grab a favorite piece, she’d likely die inside as she returned over and over to rescue every piece of art. For now, she takes full advantage of her spacious walls to showcase a puzzle- like arrangement of her beloved works. Outsider folk canvases, abstract art, fine landscape paintings, period portraits, three-dimensional works, and vintage metal signs are juxtaposed higgledy-piggledy for a grand effect that defies convention. In Smith’s bold and capable hands, it all works.

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MASTER OF THE MIX

Previous spread: Smith says there’s an inviting challenge in unfinished spaces. For her, each item tells a story, and she is constantly rewriting the narrative by rearranging her treasures. Assorted gilded Buddha statues and temple pieces are arranged on Italian carved wood sconces around the mantel and grouped with a self-portrait by Ohio artist Pascal Cuçaro and a Marimekko original. This page, clockwise from top: The wall above the living room sofa is covered with a variety of art, which is how Smith, shown at right, likes things. South American masks coupled with Native American platters and African folk art hang on the wall. Opposite: A collection of antique fans inherited from her mother hang on the walls in the dining room.

TRUE TO HERSELF

Smith surrounds herself with things she loves. In the bedroom, art from different styles and periods hangs on the wall by her bed; most pieces, she says, are for sale. A turn-of-the20th-century stage coach cloak with ermine fur, a family heirloom, rests on the end of the bed with a pink wool and blue handstitched embroidery throw. A zebra pouf and a reupholstered chair from her shop anchor the sunny window. A collection of hard-to-find glass and resin dandelion paperweights in the dining room.