| 
Eclectic Lake Cottage Decorating
Antiques such as these croquet balls
make up many of the artful displays.
Summer Cottage
Irving Stenn's summer cottage by Lake Michigan totals only 1,200 square feet. Its furnishings are a mix of items: modern metal-mesh chairs, a 1960s orange floor lamp and an Amish milking stool. The artwork is mostly by artists unknown by the typical gallery owner.
But the sum of all these seemingly random, look-what-I-found-at-the-flea-market parts is a personality that many spacious, modern vacation homes can't match.
"What I love is that when you walk in the door, the house seems to reach out and put its arms around you," says Judith Racht, who put her talents as an art collector, interior and building designer and old friend of Irving"s to work on the house. "This is what I think a Michigan cottage should be."
Eras and styles mix in the living room,
where a 1950s beverage cart stands
beside an Amish bench and a painting
by self-taught artist Casey McGlynn.
Irving was prepared to raze the 1920s cottage he acquired near Harbert in southwest Michigan when he invited Judith to see it. She looked past the garbage-strewn interior and rotting siding to see the structure of a classic lake home -- a structure, she persuaded him, that was worth saving. They set out to renovate and redecorate using all things well-used, antique, or, in some cases, discarded as trash.
"Everything in here is old, except the two couches and the mattresses on the beds," Judith says. She rescued the old claw-foot tub, for instance, from a nearby field. The beds are dressed with vintage Amish quilts and antique embroidered pillowcases. An Amish farmer made the white picket fence from posts retired from his own property.
