By Kaye Ross

JOE HU/TOWN CRIER The garden of Cottage Green Home & Garden Boutique is as fanciful as the interior. Owner Sylvia Gray shows off a yard sculpture of a guitar player.

The 1917 cottage at 145 First St. was occupied for years by the Los Altos librarian, whose commute consisted of walking across the street to the library, where the post office is today.

Now, there’s a new librarian in town. The library she presides over is not neatly arranged by Dewey decimal system but by stylish vignette, each tableau of antique, vintage and modern decorative items a lesson in how to bring character to the home by adding surprise to more modern interior design.

Sylvia Gray of Menlo Park took over Cottage Green Home & Garden Boutique last year. She has always had a decorating knack and a good eye for quality at yard sales and auctions, but Gray never was formally trained in interior design. Gray needed a change after 25 years as a management consultant, so she put her business sense together with her first love. Gray got the schooling she needed in home and garden design by working for a year in a collective before buying Cottage Green.

There was another motivation. “My husband said, ‘We just cannot have this much stuff piling up in the house,’” Gray said.

It’s easy to empathize. Cottage Green is a feast of found style, and so many different tidbits are crowded into the space that it’s hard to walk a step without finding something unique to pore over.

“It’s been embellished quite a bit since I took it over,” Gray said.

Just inside the door, for instance, is a folk art oil portrait of a bull. He is wearing a garland of greens and flowers around his neck, almost certainly because he had just won a contest for being the most beautiful bull in the county. He would make a great conversation piece for the wall of a den or kitchen.

Inside the wood room, a cedar-paneled addition from the ’50s, is antique and vintage furniture arranged to give buyers ideas for using it in unconventional ways to bring a spark to a room. There is a series of mirrors made by one of Gray’s vendors using recycled tin ceiling material for the frames. A grand 10-foot French etched-glass mirror stands nearby. Gray notes what grace it would bring to one of the large homes in the area.

Nestled against a wall is a Spark Insulated gas stove that looks new but is actually from the 1930s. Its four burners are sparkling clean, and the finish on the exterior of the stove has none of the heavy-pan pockmarks that often mar old appliances. A large knob at the side of the oven denotes temperature settings for the small space inside. No wonder women spent so much time in the kitchen in those days - just rotating the baking would take hours.

A large, long bench from Hungary is used as a table to display knickknacks. A heavy harvest table came from a peach farmer’s auction in Sunnyvale. And against the back wall is Gray’s most recent find - a French walnut armoire so massive that it took four men several hours to wrestle it into the cottage after Gray had “cleared a path” for transit.

“I want to help people learn how to blend the old and the new,” Gray said. “You can mix Pottery Barn with more unique things and add a little whimsy to your home.”

As an example, Gray pointed to an old lightning rod. Designed as an obelisk with a point on top to draw the lightning, the rod has a large pale blue glass ball in the center of the tripod design - looking more like a piece of modern art than an old salvage piece. Place it on a coffee table or display rack and it becomes decorative art.

Many older pieces also gain new life when given them unexpected uses, Gray said. A big painted-tin tub sits upside-down on a large table, becoming a kind of plateau for display of special items. Put a top on an old English washing tub called a Molly bin and it turns into a side table. A large bench is used as a coffee table.

In her searches for decorative delights, Gray has found several area artists whose unusual works occupy special niches at Cottage Green. She was at a farmers’ market in Menlo Park one day when she noticed a teenager being removed by police for not having a permit to sell earrings. Gray gave Kelsey Peart her card, and now Kelsey’s handmade earrings are for sale in the shop.

Similarly, Libby Farel, like Peart from Menlo Park, decorates notebooks with collages of vintage and new clippings and found art, and Gray sells those in her store. Cottage Green also carries birdhouses by Lisa Baker, a Palo Alto artist who covers the houses with colorful shells she has found near the ocean.

“I think it is very important to support other small-business owners,” Gray said.

One of them most unusual crafts for sale at Cottage Green are decorative pillows, made with embroidery from old handkerchiefs, swatches of antique cloth and old lace. It is a wonderful use for estate hand-me-downs that modern families will only keep in drawers. Using your grandmother’s handkerchiefs for a pillow displays her treasures in a way that can be appreciated every day.

The garden of Cottage Green is filled with ideas for yard sculpture and other decorations. Gray calls this the more masculine side of the business. On one end of the house is an array of rustic rakes, long wooden troughs, pails and other good raw materials for the handy person in the home. Lawn furniture dots the front yard, and even here Gray has found new uses for old items.

Gray notes a terra cotta English chimney top as a good lawn sculpture. You can also use them for their intended purpose, she said. One of her clients has given her specs for a chimney top he would like to put on his roof.

Gray said she has enjoyed getting to know the neighborhood and the warm residents of Los Altos. And she loves working at this new venture, with all the creativity - and hunting - it requires.

“I have always been a little bit of a scavenger,” Gray said. “I am always looking. It never stops.”

Cottage Green is open 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information, call 941-5593.