Within weeks of Brown’s settling in, the apartment was almost unrecognizable. “I wish I could be one of those people who could buy a thing, live with it, throw it out and move on,” he says.
By the time the 59-year-old found his current home in 2013, a 1,000-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on the top floor of a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, he needed a 20-foot truck to transport the goods he’d accumulated. sun-bleached sea turtle shells from a vacation in Maine. His first job, at 18, was dressing windows at the Richmond department store Thalhimers, and on the weekends he began collecting antique furniture and curiosities, a habit that continued into adulthood, as he worked as an interior stylist and retail art director, picking up treasures wherever he went: a 1920s lacquered gold Japanese screen from a stint living in Portland, Ore. By the age of 10, he had graduated to Goofus glass vases - cold-painted trinkets produced in the early 20th century that were often given as fairground prizes - and old-fashioned spectacle frames he’d find at local flea markets. AS A CHILD in Virginia, Michael Brown collected birds’ nests, stamps and mounted beetles and butterflies.
