Gallery: Shabby Love: A Virginia Shop ...

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Shabby Love started like so many small businesses. When Hannah married her husband, a horticulturist who took a job at an estate in Virginia, friends and family donated a bunch of what she calls ugly furniture. “I’ve always been a hands on person,” she said. “My whole life I was always really artsy, so I started taking these pieces and fixing them and painting them.” Soon enough her friends asked her to do the same thing for their furniture and urged her to start a business. “They’d say ‘Hannah, you’re really good at this. You should start a business.’ And I’d just laugh and tell them ‘no, I don’t want to do that.’”

Eventually, after moving to a part of Virginia that has more thrift stores than bars, Hannah started attending estate sales to buy furniture to restore. “I was really inspired by all the old furniture here,” she said. Pretty soon, after further prompting from her friends, she started a small website on which she could advertise her upcycled masterpieces.” “It just took off she said, it blew up!” Hannah’s work became so popular that people begged her to open a store. Again she resisted, but the demand was so great despite the extraordinarily small population that Shabby Love was almost born of its own free will.