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At the Red Shed Cottage Chic Antiques in Grapevine, Michele McKechnie and her business partners infuse the castoff objects of others’ pasts with airiness and light, giving them new, sometimes whimsical uses.
They’ve paired vintage chandelier crystals with old keys in necklaces, and framed an illustrated French translation of Beauty and the Beast in a vertical tableau. They’ve painted an early 1900s fireplace mantel an eggshell white and a round dining table with a black and white Harlequin pattern for a striking effect. Vintage French hair ribbons, rolls of antique lace and a white chicken perched on a high shelf give the store a fun, eclectic feel. But for McKechnie, 52, with honey-blond hair and blue eyes, this business is about more than the objects themselves. She’ll tell you that these lovingly restored items reflect her own rejuvenation in the wake of illness and that they’re a reminder that life is too short to not do something you enjoy. "When you feel yucky and ugly and horrible and you take something that is yucky, ugly and horrible and you spit on it and clean it up . . . it’s a creative outlet that makes you not think about pain or sickness," she says. In 2003, McKechnie and business partner Valarie Jolly were running their two-decades-old travel business in Arlington. Whether it was across the country or in Paris, both women loved to travel. And wherever they happened to be, they picked up a vintage object or two for display in the office. That January, McKechnie, a single mom with an 8-year-old, was found to have cancer in her right breast, an aggressive ductal carcinoma that radiologists hadn’t seen on a mammogram just two months earlier. Eight months of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation followed, and later, a mastectomy of the other breast to prevent a recurrence. During the time she was lying in bed feeling lousy from all the treatment, she wondered, "If I ever get my health back, what would I like to do?" "I wasn’t exactly pulling a lot of satisfaction as a travel agent," she recalls, though she still enjoyed the travel part of the job. "The more I thought about it, the more I was determined to do something more fulfilling." One day a vision of life post-cancer came to her. "Wouldn’t it be nice to have our own building and do travel and antiques?" she told Jolly. Both had often paged through home magazines playing "what if" with their love of found objects. Was it that age-old wisdom of being able to reach those dreams you can see? Or was it the simple act of being open to what the universe has to offer? Either way, no sooner had the idea popped in her head than the pieces of this new life began falling into place. She began scouting locations in Grapevine, a city she considered the perfect place to combine the travel agency with an antiques store. In 2005, she stumbled on a property for sale between historic Main Street and the residential neighborhood to the west. It had a house, a large garden and a tumble-down shed. The place needed work, but she knew how to make old things shine again. Since then, 317 Church St. has been headquarters to Riverside Travel Gallery and the Red Shed.
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