Local Refurbished Furniture Shop Expands from Etsy into Roscoe Village

Mint Home, an online furniture shop, expanded on June 22 into the empty storefront at 2117 W. Irving Park Rd.

The popular Etsy site, owned by co-owners Jessie Kuhny and Keisha Bandealy, is managed out of a basement workshop in Ravenswood.

But co-owner Jessie Kuhny only recalls the opening date because the day before, she was in the hospital with her new-born baby who came a week earlier than expected. And two weeks after, Kuhny jumped right into manning the store with her daughter napping in a rocker behind the register.

Kuhny and co-owner Keisha Bandealy met while working as servers at a downtown restaurant a few years ago. They both loved refurbishing pieces of furniture, and they discovered they had similar tastes in style. So when the restaurant shut down, they decided to fix up old pieces of furniture and sell them full-time.

"It's been a two-women production for many years, and we've had great success on Etsy," Kuhny says.

The basement in Ravenswood will still operate as the business' workshop, where they sand, prime, paint and seal all the pieces of furniture they create. Before the store opened, the workshop also doubled as an office, out of which they shipped everything.

All of the pieces, Kuhny says, the pair picks up from estate sales around town and resale shops.

Kuhny, with a background in visual art, and Bandealy, whose mother owned an antique shop in Georgia, work together to design the pieces.

"We love a really beautiful mix of styles and eras so that when you walk into somebody's home, it's interesting and it's not just cookie cutter or all of those big name stores. We always think, what would we want in our homes," Kuhny says.

But sometimes that makes it difficult for her to part with some of her favorite creations. "I'm fortunate enough that if I really love a piece, I can just keep it," she says.

Recently, Kuhny has noticed parents purchasing low dressers to use as baby-changing tables. "We use low-VOC paints to keep things safe for kids. It's crazy, but it's cool because changing tables are usually ugly, but these kids will have really kick-ass bedrooms with midcentury modern dressers," she says.

One thing important to the business owners is keeping the price point affordable.

"We want to make things for the demographic that we are. We were restaurant servers, so we want to create stuff that, while beautiful, might otherwise have been overlooked," Kuhny says. "We've sold things to everyone from college students to 60-year-old grandmothers."

Kuhny and Bandealy create six to ten pieces of furniture a week and sell usually ten pieces in the same time. Through their Etsy page, they have access to a national marketplace, and people have ordered from New York, Washington D.C. and even California.

But Kuhny points out, "Opening the store has been great for the local market and getting to meet the people who are purchasing what I create."