You Can Never Have Too Many Mugs: A Conversation with Local Biz Owners Kelsey Brown and Adrian Smith on Art and Objects at Home

When both people in a household are builders, you might expect their home to feel like a project. Kelsey and Adrian's doesn't. It feels settled – warm, assembled over time, without an agenda. Which turns out to say something about how and what they build: small businesses, embedded in their community, modest in tone but expansively thoughtful. No hard hats needed.

Textile artist Kelsey co-owns the stunningly stocked Village Fabric Shop with fellow artist and educator Nicole Asselin, which they lovingly took over and resurrected during the pandemic. Adrian spent those same years plotting out a different kind of venture, growing his burrito business, Robert Rust Foods, out of a pop-up, a handful of beloved recipes, and mechanics' skills.

The married couple welcomed me in through the side door, directly into the kitchen. It felt like the right room to find them in; like the rest of their home, it is warm and eclectic – part travel memoir, part love letter to everything handmade.

A colorful print of a sunny kitchen stovetop, hanging on the wall above their own sunny kitchen stovetop. Little wooden spoons from a woodworking town in Japan waiting patiently in a drawer. A hand painted "potato box" that feels more like folk art than food storage. Things gathered, not 'installed'.

We sat down to talk about small business, how they think about buying art and objects, and what they'd tell someone just starting out.

Neither of them would describe themselves as collectors – the word feels too formal, too removed from how they actually live. What they do instead is source things with a story, things made by people they care about, things beautiful enough to use every day.

Want to start sourcing your own story? Start today at Visual Index.

AS: Tell me about your businesses and how you each ended up there.

Kelsey: Village Fabric Shop was kind of a pandemic circumstance. I was working at a nonprofit doing arts programming at the Children's Hospital, and when March 2020 happened, my job changed completely. There was already a Village Fabric Shop in Reynolda Village, and it closed. My now co-owner Nicole Asselin and I had met teaching natural dyes and weaving classes at Sawtooth, and we were both really passionate about textiles and community spaces and bringing good quality materials to people. So we were like, should we reopen it? We bought their website and customer list, kept the same name, did a Kickstarter, and just kind of went from there.

Adrian: About a year later, I left my job as executive director of Flywheel Foundation where I was doing entrepreneurial programming, startup accelerator work. With the pandemic it had all gone virtual, and I needed a change. I quit in January, started working on a scooter my mom had in her shed, developed a handful of burrito recipes, and did my first pop-up in June of 2022 at Fair Witness [Bar]. People started buying extras to take home, and I thought, maybe I could do frozen. I've got a friend who started a national frozen burrito company, so with his mentorship that's the direction I've been going ever since. I still do pop-ups and farmers markets, but the focus is on wholesale, retail, and food service.

AS: How long have you two been in Winston-Salem? How did you get here?

Kelsey: I moved here in October of 2015 from Asheville. Adrian moved back in early 2017, and we got married in 2020.

Adrian: We both went to Warren Wilson College [a progressive Liberal Arts & Sciences school known for its hands-on, community-engaged Work Program]. We were there at the same time; it's only about 900 students, but we weren't in the same major or friend group. We recognized each other when we met at a show at Christmastime after graduating, and that was it!

AS: Do you think of yourselves as collectors?

Kelsey: I wouldn't describe myself that way, no. But I do intentionally want to buy art, and I would like to buy as much as I can. I love having useful items that are also art…ask Adrian about my mug collection [laughs]. There's a crossover with functional things that I really appreciate. As a textile person, a lot of the work I've always been drawn to is useful, or things you interact with often.

Adrian: ”Collector” has weird connotations for me…either hoarding, or being real fancy. My mom refers to herself as a collector, and that's sweet, but I wouldn't call myself one. It's more like what Kelsey said: buying stuff we use, or things that reflect values we care about, or a connection to something we love to do. That makes it even better.

Kelsey: We're not big on giving presents on holidays, but we've started a tradition for our anniversary of buying something together as a memento. I think our first anniversary we bought the print in the hall, and this past one we got the piece on the mantle from Visual Index.

AS: Do you remember when you first started buying art?

Kelsey: No, no specific memory of a specific object or piece. I've always had small things: pincushions, figurines, pill boxes. But nothing large, really, until we bought this house in 2019.

Adrian: Same—it changed when we moved into this house, because before that I was moving around a lot. I never felt like I could spend money on something without feeling I had a permanent-enough space for it.

AS: Why does having art or craft objects in your home matter to you?

Kelsey: Besides just bringing joy, I get sentimental about things. The memory of how you got it, where you got it, or who made it tells a story. That painting in the living room is of a Winston-Salem street corner — it's a concrete park now, that whole block has changed.

And every time we travel, we try to find a gallery and get a little something. When we were in Japan, we found this town called Takayama, known for woodworking, and we settled on little spoons because that's what we could carry in our suitcases. In Mexico we found these beautiful tapestries.

Adrian: I like functional things because they have soul and character. It's a lot more interesting than going to Target, and it feels different in your hand. But I also think wall art just makes the room better. Even from a utilitarian perspective, it's so much better than a blank wall. And if you do have a connection with the artist, or a story behind it through travel or whatever, that makes a big difference.

We have pieces from childhood friends, and every time I see them I think about those people. One of our good friends from Warren Wilson — her mom is an artist whose work is in the house. And we have prints of Anna Murphy's murals — she grew up in England, moved to the States in eighth grade, that's when Kelsey met her. She's in Chicago now, known for her large-scale murals, and she designed the Woodford Reserve Kentucky Derby commemorative bottle.

AS: How do you make decisions together? Does everything have to be a joint call?

Kelsey: If I really want a mug, I just get it, because I already know what Adrian's answer would be! [”You have enough mugs”]

Adrian: If it's a bigger expense, I might say hey, what do you think? But no, there's no serious criteria. Nothing we have is what you might think of as “investment-level”.

AS: Are you intentional about a specific aesthetic, or do your choices naturally reflect your personal taste?

Kelsey: For me it’s more hodgepodge than intentional, I think. Everyone has a style, but I don't always know who an artist is, and if I like their work I might Google them first just to make sure they're not terrible humans…cool artists are not always cool people, after all.

I'd say my style is mid-century modern with a little bohemian. But I’m not specifically intentional about that; most things in our house have been given to us or found.

Adrian: You can be intentional about a style and still not be able to afford it, so it naturally ends up a little hodgepodge. I do like mid-century, natural materials, handmade. But I also don't like clutter. If things have a place, it's fine, but if it's just stuff scattered around it bothers my senses.

Kelsey: Which is why most of my trinkets are in the sewing room!

AS: What would you tell someone who's just starting to buy art with their partner?

Adrian: Go to Visual Index.

Kelsey: Honestly — it's so much easier when there's a well-curated store or gallery, because you're not hunting. We would both like almost anything at Visual Index because it's our style and we trust the curation. Some galleries will be more your style than others, but the more you go in and look at things together, the easier it becomes. You figure out what you both like.

Adrian: And I’d say: think about art as more than wall art. Think about all the things you use every day — a mug, a spoon, your tools. Buying something that somebody has thought about, that they've put real time into developing a craft and building. I get a lot of joy from that. It really opens up the possibilities of what you might bring home, beyond the wall.