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There is nothing like the thrill of finding just the right piece at a great secondhand decor score. Shannon Brydges and her now-husband Kyle Goodman bonded over just that when they started dating. “We would go to estate sales and thrift stores together and just look for stuff,” Brydges recalls. “But if you buy enough vintage, then you start having too much.” Eventually, she ended up selling some of her finds on Etsy, and when a retail space became available in their town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the fall of 2020, Brydges decided to realize her long-held dream of opening a brick and mortar store. Malofta Vintage (“malofta” is Esperanto for “rare and unique”) was born.
A year earlier, the couple had purchased a house. Just 768 square feet, the single-story home was built in 1942 and offered a true blank slate for them to decorate. Furnishing the whole place with secondhand finds was an easy choice. Because Brydges is always shopping for her store, she has a slight professional advantage when it comes to finding great pieces, but says it still took time and patience to find what they needed. Thrifting for a small, older house with tight corners “can require some hunting,” she explains. Armed with a list of the home’s dimensions in her wallet, she filled the house inch by inch.
Sometimes it was trial and error. “I’ve had so many different coffee tables that were not quite right,” Brydges laughs. Other times, she had to get creative with what she found. In the bedroom, for example, she ended up sourcing two nightstands that she pushed together as a dresser because a standard-sized chest of drawers was too big for the available wall space.
The couple have also put their do-it-yourself skills to work, painting, installing storage, and refreshing the retro kitchen and bathroom themselves. Brydges credits Goodman with most of their successes: “My husband is meticulous. He’s a good counterweight for my bull-in-the-china-shop energy,” she explains. “He can figure out how to do anything.” In fact, Goodman recently started making vintage-inspired lamps, which he sells under the name Pilot Light Lamps at Brydges’s store.
Fresh paint, new cabinet knobs, and a tile backsplash gave the kitchen a completely refreshed look. Brydges even convinced her dad, a former tile installer, to come out of retirement for one day to help her install the tiles, a mix of handmade ones she had found at auction and standard square ceramic tiles. “It’s really sweet, having something that my dad helped me do in our house,” she says.
To pull it all together, Brydges picked complimentary colors and balancing finishes. “If a room or a corner is starting to veer into, say, a 1970s historical reenactment, or is too cutesy, I try to adjust and be willing to edit, which can be hard,” she admits. Brydges says the house is still—and may always be—a work in progress, as she can’t help but change it up when a great vintage find comes her way. For example, the previous kitchen chairs got cycled out when she found the red, Italian folding chairs that are now a focal point of the room. “Luckily for the store,” she says, “our house is so small that I can’t keep too many things.”
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