Beautiful & Useful
Avid antique collector Pam Tillis lets nothing in her home gather dust
By Angela Wibking, photos by Virgil Fox
Millions of viewers tune into the PBS hit Antique Roadshow each week. Grammy-winning recording star Pam Tillis isn’t one of them. “I don’t watch Antique Roadshow,” says this avid collector with a laugh. “ I live it.”
A tour of Tillis’ Nashville home confirms that claim. There’s a painted Scottish hutch the singer picked up in Asheville, N.C., that accents a sun porch overlooking the pool. In a spare bedroom, an ornately carved sleeping cabinet from Brittany found in Kansas City serves as a headboard. The pair of black lacquer nightstands with mother-of-pearl inlay in Tillis’ bedroom hails from the American embassy in Cuba by way of a Music City antique shop. Then there’s a vast wood armoire that Tillis shipped home from Topeka, Oriental reverse paintings from an island off the coast of Washington and an early 1800s painting of a Venetian circus that Tillis came across in upstate New York.
In fact, no matter where in the country the singer’s career takes her, she always budgets time for checking out the local antique shops with an eye to adding to her collection. In Nashville and Franklin, Tillis’ list of favorite antique haunts includes American Classical Antiques and other shops along Eighth Avenue, Heritage Gallery, the Shoppes at Belle Meade, Clementine’s and Calvert Antiques—just to name a few.
The result of Tillis’ cross-country antiquing is a home whose decor beautifully defines that overused term “eclectic.” In fact, Tillis mixes Victorian, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts and Empire styles in her contemporary brick home with as much flair as she handles a hard-driving rock song or a country ballad. Her latest album It’s All Relative, not so coincidentally, is a tribute to the music of her father Mel Tillis that demonstrates his daughter’s talent for crossing musical time lines. “I’m a very nostalgic person—maybe to a fault,” Tillis says. “I’ve been wanting to do this album for five years—not only because my dad’s songs are classics, but because they are also the songs that rocked my cradle, since my mom couldn’t carry a tune!”
If Tillis’ mother Doris wasn’t a musical muse, she inspired her daughter in other ways. “I blame my mom for so many of my obsessions, including my love of antiques,” Tillis says. “We moved into this old 1920s stucco farmhouse when I was 12 years old and Mom bought a few nice pieces from Bradford’s. But she really made the house sing when she started going to flea markets and junk shops around town.”
For Tillis today, making her own house sing is a matter of mixing an Irish wake table with an ebony Victorian sideboard in her dining room and balancing those pieces with a contemporary mirrored room screen and a wall of 1920s publicity photographs of obscure film and theater actors. “Those are one of the things I collect,” she says, referring to the old photographs. “I also have some old cameras and even an old movie camera with a vintage Mickey Mouse film.” Tillis isn’t into collecting items to put on a shelf, though. “I don’t buy knickknacks. If I can’t use it, I don’t buy it.”
A case in point is the tea Tillis and her friends backup singer Lona Heins and hair and makeup stylist Paula Jehle-Turner served the day I visited the Tillis home. From the tablecloth and linens to the silver napkin rings, china plates and jewel-toned glass goblets, everything was as pleasing to look at as it was to use. Even the miniature child’s teacup Tillis plucked from a cupboard at the last minute for her young godchild Cheyenne Thompson was a perfect fit. “You shouldn’t be afraid to use antiques,” Tillis says. “I buy old dishes so I can use them.”
Tillis’ living room is another example of eclectic done right. Matching contemporary sofas in soft green chenille face each other and flank the fireplace, over which hangs a late 19th century mirror that’s lost its silvering here and there. Naturally, Tillis wouldn’t dream of restoring it. “Just because something’s new or looks it, that doesn’t always make it better,” she says. In one corner of the room is an old oak writing desk, whose casual clutter indicates it’s used and not just admired by the singer. On another wall is one of Tillis’ favorite finds. “It’s a dark oak chest that I found at K & T Lamps in Green Hills. They were just using it for display,” she says. “It’s a little more ornate than I usually go for and I’m guessing it’s from the Victorian Aesthetic era. I’d love to know its real history, so maybe I would take that to Antique Roadshow.”
The room that gets the biggest response from guests, though, is the smallest one in the house. “The powder room off the hall gets the most comments,” Tillis admits. “I wanted to make it a little jewel so I had the walls done in a deep plum Venetian plaster and hung these fabulous Oriental reverse paintings that I’ve found in Nashville and in Washington.” The paintings, done on mirrors, form a grouping with two plaster Oriental heads (from a shop in Goodlettsville) that covers the powder room wall.
Over the years, Tillis has learned her lesson on impulse buying or purchasing something that needed too much work. “I don’t buy anything that’s broken anymore unless something just screams 'take me home.’” While Tillis admits she usually depends on experts for window treatments, she doesn’t use a decorator. “I think a decorator is good if you have to get things done quickly, but the kind of decorating I grew up with develops over time,” she says. One of the things she’s learned over time is to buy quality. “If I had it to do over, I’d have bought better pieces—that’s the bad side of being a bargain hunter.”
As much as she enjoys beautiful antiques, Tillis is hard pressed to name a treasure she might grab in the event of a fire. “The flip side of all of this is that it’s only stuff,” Tillis says. “Sure, it’s a passion for me but at the end of the day I remind myself that this is a way to set the stage, to create a home environment where people are the main thing.”
As much as she enjoys beautiful antiques, Tillis is hard pressed to name a treasure she might grab in the event of a fire. “The flip side of all of this is that it’s only stuff,” Tillis says. “Sure, it’s a passion for me but at the end of the day I remind myself that this is a way to set the stage, to create a home environment where people are the main thing.”
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