Midcentury modern Lexington, Kentucky: Huckleberry’s Chair Fetish

This is not my house. It is the first room in Huckleberry’s Chair Fetish – a midcentury modern shop near the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Regular readers will recall that I visited Lexington last Thanksgiving to meet up with Sumac Sue aka Judi for a look at her house, her neighborhood, a pink bathroom, an aqua bathroom — and yes, a little side trip to this mid mod furniture shop she had recently discovered. Even though it’s taken me a while to get to this post, it is not for lack of immediate love of the place starting with the name, Huckleberry’s Chair Fetish. First there’s the surname Huckleberry, it goes with Earlene – the proprietress.  Then there’s Chair Fetish. Earlene is calibrated as nutso as the rest of us for this mid mod stuff. Her eyes had that wild look when she talked about her store and all its contents. Fetish. That  just about sums it up. And I bet that putting it into the headline of this post is going to bring me a whole new slew of readers. Oh joy.

The sign out front. Please note, I do think that mid-century with the hyphen is the correct spelling. I usually write midcentury, though. Because it’s my blog, and hyphens annoy me. I also am really trying to lay off the exclamation points, as well as the excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. Em dashes, though, I’m all about em dashes.

This is my my sister Jenni driving, she gets major snaps for coming along, and I think she even had fun. That’s Judi in the passenger seat. I don’t for a minute believe they are both natural blondes at this point, but who am I to talk? I plan to never ever know what my natural hair color is again.

This is Earlene. She basically told us that she had recently discovered mid century modern , and was immediately, irrevocably sucked into the retro vortex. There was no stopping it. She had to open the shop and seek out all she could find. Earlene is a force of nature to be reckoned with. The shop is normally closed on Sundays, the day we came, and Judi had called her ahead of time to see if we could get in. Thanks, Earlene, for hosting us! You get an exclamation point!

This white leather lounge chair was definitely my #1 object of desire. So impractical.

A lucite bar and matching bar stools.

This upholstered Danish club chair (I think you’d call it) was upstairs. I really like the stripes and the pukey colors. Really.

Thayer-Coggin, maybe? I’m just starting to get to know the high style designers. These kind of remind me of baseball mitts.

Earlene had a collection of tiny chairs. See the label inside? That’s a 3/4″-1″ price tag. So it gives you a sense of the size of this piece. As I recall, this miniature was worth more than most of us would consider paying for a fullsized chair…

There were other kinds of furniture, too, like this poster bed. 80s? So fabulous. And I like how Earlene backs the whole thing with a mirror to play up the silvery metal. I am not keen on the placement in a real life bedroom, though — bad feng shui, as I recall.  For that matter, feng shui masters wouldn’t advise a metal bed, anyway. Too cold. Beds must be made of natural materials, as I recall. Oh well.

Sweet lamp and shade. As you can begin to tell, it doesn’t appear that Earlene is a slave to any one niche. Just quality, wonderful stuff.

This buffet was in the entry way. Darnit, I think I noted the maker somewhere. Usually I just take a photo of any labels I see, but hmmmm, not there.

And of course I snooped around. Out the upstairs back window I spotted stuff out back waiting to be brought inside. If you look closely – there are some fab looking mod orange pinch pleats in a pile by the blue containers. I hinted to Earlene about taking a look. But she didn’t bite. So, I restrained myself. Drats.