A Creative Evolution: I think my home, like most people’s homes, evolves with our family. Navigating life with a toddler is very different from life as an empty nester. Time, patience, and budget are drastically different at those times and that has probably been the biggest life lesson for me when it comes to creating a home—your house gets to reflect you and where you are in life, and that’s a good thing.

A Room With A View: Typically, my favorite room is whichever one I have just updated. The way the house is laid out, you can stand in the kitchen and see through to the dining room and living room, and I often smile when I get that long view because while the rooms serve different purposes, they all speak to each other.

The front room many would consider small, just 11-by-12 feet, and has been a preschooler’s playroom, a homework station, a spare bedroom, and now my home office. The windows fill the space with natural light and many of my plants thrive there. Someone asked if I had too many plants, and my answer was, “Define too many.” There are currently 53, including a Schlumbergera truncata that is almost 30 years old.

Merry-land: I am a Marylander through and through. Both of my parents were born here. When my brother and I were born, my parents wanted us to grow up more rurally, and we spent most of our childhood in Carroll County. I left for college and swore I would never come back. But I moved back in my late 20s and bought a house near Patterson Park through the Patterson Park Community Development Corp. After my son was born, we moved to Idlewylde and have lived here for almost 20 years.

The Art of Upcycling: In the front room of my house is a large brown leather couch. I knew it needed a bit more structure and wanted to find a way to add elements of an heirloom Hudson Bay blanket. The blanket was gifted to me by my Aunt Eleanor in the 1980s and I used it for years, taking it from college dorms to NYC apartments and my first home in Baltimore.

I noticed it was started to show its age and put it away “for safe keeping.” But beautiful family heirlooms don’t belong tucked away in a box in the closet. The dynamic team of upholsterers at Savoir Chair helped bring my idea to life and transformed my sketches into the perfect additions to the couch.

Travel Near and Far: We are a family that loves to travel, and our home is filled with nods to our adventures, from the collection of whimsical magnets to artwork to the bowl of small rocks we’ve picked up along the way.

I was raised to be curious, to ask questions, and to explore, and I was intentional about raising my son the same way. Our home is filled with things that enable curiosity while also being a comfortable hideaway, a place to rest when the world is too much.

What 24 hours earlier had been a vacant storefront in North Baltimore was now a carefully curated pop-up shop. And on this Saturday morning in March, customers streamed into the temporary home-goods shop Taken, filling the space with excited murmurs as they browsed through the products, many of them one-of-a-kind.

Offering everything from Wight Tea Company’s loose-leaf teas to fragrant handcrafted soaps by Silver Linings Lavender and soy candles by Art C, owner Vanessa Milio says she wants her customers to see the best of Maryland goods, crafts, and collectibles. An aficionado of cool, vintage stuff, Milio, who holds a master’s degree in book arts and printmaking from Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, is no stranger to showing up to an estate sale, eager for a good find, only to have the best antiques bearing the dreaded label reading, “taken.” “You’re in that moment of, ‘Ugh, I wanted that!’ It’s like, ‘I missed something,’” she says.

As a child Milio had a dream of being an artist, an aspiration that has morphed a little bit: A longtime plan to set up a community hub that sells handmade goods was set in motion three years ago while Milio was attending a women-in-business event with a friend. Previously the president and CEO of the Harford County Chamber of Commerce, Milio was an expert when it came to helping small businesses get off the ground, but her nonprofit work took up most of her professional energy, delaying dreams of owning a craft store until after retirement.

But as she sat at the event, taking in the same advice as dozens of others who were mulling a business venture, Milio realized there wasn’t really anything stopping her—not even her other professional commitments or her responsibilities as a mother.

Six weeks later, in December of 2015, Taken hosted its first pop-up at The Painted Palette in Mt. Washington. Despite the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it nature of that first event—with set-up, sale, and break-down happening within the same day—its unexpected success made it evident that Taken was here to stay: Lines were out the door as people waited for a peek at the goods offered by the 30 makers featured.

Since then, she’s had pop-up shops from Bel Air to Chestertown (and also online at shoptaken.com). And besides featuring local makers, they’ve also reflected her support of sustainability through the sale of vintage pieces, a belief that inspired the company’s tagline, “forever reinventing.”

“You’re telling a story of these vintage pieces, of the lineage of these maker products,” she says. “And you’re then saying to the customer, ‘If you find something you love, that’s part of your story now.’”