Stephen Harper, owner of Mainly Antiques, is working to revitalize the city of Chattanooga one antique at a time.
Mainly Antiques owner Stephen Harper welcomes guests to his gallery-style antique home furnishings store."The thing that fascinates me is the redevelopment of cities," he said. "The interesting thing is that antique stores are actually destinations and are in the vanguard of redevelopment. I love Chattanooga and this part of the country and want to see it reach its potential."
Harper began his career with antiques during the revitalization years of Chattanooga in 1999. His first antique store, Antiques on Main, was located in the building currently occupied by Alleia Restaurant. His new antique shop opened in the fall and is located on the corner of East Main Street and Central Avenue.
Mainly Antiques will host a sale throughout the month of July to close out inventory in preparation for a showroom full of new items. Harper will close his shop during the month of August while he travels abroad to handpick merchandise for the next year. The shop will reopen in September.
Harper utilizes his cultural anthropology background to help his customers choose the perfect piece of home furnishing to enhance their decor.
"Antiques embody the ideas of the people who made them," Harper said. "This is why repurposing these antiques can so greatly enrich our contemporary lifestyle. In the everyday practice of using them, these cultural artifacts continually inform and help shape our new lifestyle as we create it."
Mainly Antiques is organized in a gallery style to highlight each piece, whether it dates from 18th-century England or 1950s America. Currently, Harper said, interior design trends lean toward a type of modernist globalism which he thinks will only continue gaining in popularity for the next 50 years. Part of the eclectic move to modernism includes intentional mismatch shopping. Instead of finding pieces that are designed to go together, designers actively search for pieces that don't match, but create a certain harmony within the room.
Mainly Antiques carries everything from a Swedish china cabinet from the late 19th century, Korean blanket chests and an Edo-era leaning bench used by a geisha in the early 1800s, to European oil paintings, ethnic textiles and sculptures.
A standout item currently on display is a Senufo funeral bed from the Ivory Coast of Africa. This piece, carved out of a single slab of mahogany, was never used in any funeral rites and is a unique piece to complement a home's modern décor, said Harper.