Michelle Carr

I'm a thrift-store gal from way back. I don't have a favorite era or a favorite genre at all. It's just been years and years of thrifting and collecting and dumpster diving. I love vintage pieces so much because they have soul. My bedroom is really a mishmash of everything that I love — it's almost like my subconscious materialized and exploded all over the room. I bought a bunch of saris in Artesia, Little India, because the bedroom is an add-on and it's like living in a garage, so the saris came about as a camouflage to hide the different raw beams and whatnot. There's also real strong Catholic damage — a lot of antique Catholic iconography in here that I found around. I don't shop so much anymore — can't afford it now. When I started, I was lucky. It was back when you could walk into a thrift store and it was a treasure-trove of cheap, great stuff that nobody else wanted. A friend of mine says that I really lucked out with my cheap-shit motif. I like to call it aesthetic du schlock. I read that somewhere — it suits me perfectly. My bedroom is my little hideaway. Producing the Velvet Hammer shows can be very time-consuming and stressful, and I like my room to be a retreat. Even though I've never been to these exotic places, I've brought these exotic places to my bedroom. I'm surprised that most people don't pay much attention to their bedrooms — I guess they think, I'm sleeping, not looking at it so much. It really is a little sanctuary within the home. I spend a lot of time in my room, and I try to be as leisurely as possible because even though I work a lot, I'm naturally lazy, so there are lots of lounging areas. When I have parties, it's a nice entertaining area as well. Even though some of the furniture is kind of ratty and has little tears here and there, it's perfect in that it has its own character, that history that came with it. Each piece has come about in a different time of my life and has a memory attached to it.

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