As of June 2023, VNTG Home has added on online auction service, to its home staging and selling services, expanding Feathestone’s early vision for VNTG home in new directions. This follows a move from the original space in East 4th and Superior to a new, large warehouse space no Marquette just west of East 55th. Read what we wrote back in 2017 when she was just getting started:
Megan Featherston, a native Texan, travelled all over the country for 27 years, working for a variety of major retailers such as Sears, Wilson Leathers, Michael’s, Payless and the May Company. Serendipity (and JoAnn Fabrics, based in Hudson) brought her to northeast Ohio four years ago. It was while working there that she decided it was time to start her own business — and because she was in Cleveland, she launched VNTG Home in Cleveland. She quit her job at JoAnn a year ago and began to hunt down and assemble her stock and opened VNTG home in 2017 in Tyler Village in AsiaTown. It moved a few blocks northeast to Marquette Street in October 2018. It’s open every day of the year.
When Featherston conceived the business, she saw it as filling an underserved niche between small resale shops and high-end antique stores, giving a larger clientele access to quality design for prices that weren’t sky high. She also fills a niche between baby boomers who may be downsizing and younger buyers who are looking to furnish their homes with things that aren’t cookie-cutter. She acquires her stock through purchases, consignment and donations — and when someone donates furnishings, part of the sale price goes to charity.
But, as anyone who has ever browsed second-hand furniture knows, sometimes you’ll find the perfect item but it’s in the wrong color, or upholstered with a hideous fabric. In addition to sales, VNTG home restores, repaints and re-upholsters, stocking more than 600 fabrics, most imported directly from France, in an array of colors and patterns and more than 150 paint treatments.
“What differentiates us is our design center,” says Featherston. “Life’s too short to live with something you don’t love. Most Americans can’t afford luxury but here they can. Everyone can live beautifully with beautiful things they didn’t think they can afford and do it responsibility, which is important to Millennials.”
For economic development types, VNTG Home has already created 18 full-time and part-time jobs, hiring salespeople, movers, restorers and designers. Potential customers can already shop the VNTG Home website but Featherston is working on a digital marketplace where people can list their items and shop from anywhere in the country. And in the future she’d even like to do artist gallery shows in her space.
We stopped in to meet Megan and browse the wares, which including china, books and wall art, as well as furniture and home accessories in styles ranging from mid-century modern to “holy shit — did you get that form Liberace’s estate?” It’s attractively staged in a style that finds middle ground between the enticing but confusing jumble of a junk store and the excessive tidiness of a retail furniture store.
“It’s not your grandma’s consignment,” says Featherston.
Come take a tour with us. View the PHOTOSTREAM here.
1235 Marquette Street
216.505.4322
Cleveland, OH 44114