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Cayton’s menagerie includes the enormous peacock that came to roost for her daughter's baby shower and a vintage chalkware polar bear she discovered at a garage sale for $5.
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Cayton’s husband, Lauren, crafted the wood sculptures — after Boccioni and Brancusi — from scrap wood. Above them hangs a favorite Rappahannock river house painted by Jay Bohannan.
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Cayton creates the boxed assemblages — think mini vignettes displayed throughout her home — from collected and found things.
“I want my home to be a place where my friends and family can come and play,” Maynee Cayton says.
Just steps into her Museum District house, those friends are greeted with a cabinet of curiosities, each shelf filled with shells, pictures and miniature animals. In the next room, an art deco royal-blue velvet sofa from the 1930s sits alongside two wooden cabinets from the 1800s. Her kitchen features a working 1931 gas stove and a fridge from the same era that she uses as a pantry. Meanwhile, a modern fridge sits in a custom-built cabinet lined with wallpaper she removed from the house.
Cayton’s home is also a menagerie of birds, from the row of carved parrots lining her sunroom to the delicate golden birds taking flight across her kitchen wall, as well as the dramatic oversized peacock perched atop her dining table.
Maynee Cayton
Every object tells a story — like the intricately carved late-1800s sideboard she bought for $60 at a Paris flea market when she was just 12 years old.
“I’ve always had an affinity for older things,” she says. “The stories they tell and the history they teach.”
As an Army brat, Cayton moved frequently. Whenever her family arrived in a new town, she and her mother, Barbara Church, would immediately seek out local antique shops. The four years she spent in Paris were particularly influential. There, she explored the culture and architecture of Europe, as well as its thrift stores.
Along the way, Cayton says, she developed a philosophy that the more an object is used and loved, the more value it has.
She also dreamed of owning a shop where she could sell the clothing and artifacts she collected. In 1979, she opened Bygones, a vintage clothing store in Carytown, with Church.
A few years later, married and pregnant, she and her husband, Lauren Cayton, bought their home in the Museum District. Then a rooming house, it was a bit run-down, but “amazingly original,” she says. The woodwork was unpainted, and Cayton found beautiful heart pine floors under the carpet.
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The wicker chairs and sofa once belonged to a friend’s grandmother. Cayton found the round table and lamp in an old house in Ashland.
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A large painted screen by Jay Bohannan is a backdrop for this corner vignette pairing vintage majolica, a 1930s art deco armchair and a floor lamp with an original 1920s metal mesh lampshade.
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Lauren found the hand-carved cabinet doors and the 1931 Chambers stove they still use today in a basement on Monument Avenue.
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A Black Forest bear overlooks a vintage banquette — from an old Broad Street ice cream parlor — and table with a 1930s painted cast-iron base.
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Cayton entertains her grandchildren — Atli, Fin and Iris — with an impromptu performance at a custom-made puppet theater designed by her good friend Lara Koplin Ritter.
Owning Bygones has provided an inside track for Cayton to find the objects that fill her home. She’s particularly drawn to the Georgian and Edwardian eras, as well as art deco and art nouveau. She mixes and matches and constantly changes, all while creating cohesion through colors from nature, themes and stories.
“When I find something that appeals to me, I get to bring it home and rearrange,” she says. “I get to see it all new and fresh.”
Even her holiday decorations feature a balance of natural and historical. In the living room, a small Christmas tree is placed in an art deco Egyptian revival fishbowl holder, then decorated with Shiny Brite ornaments from the 1940s and ’50s. Live greenery and a starfish tree topper add organic touches, and vintage Christmas stockings hang from the fireplace. The final vignette is reminiscent of the scenes she creates in the front window at Bygones.
Cayton sometimes wonders if her affinity for history is a response to a childhood spent moving around the world, a reaction to her own lack of heirlooms and family treasures.
“I’m terribly sentimental about other families’ things,” she says. “They become a part of my family.”
