The Henry Ford: Furniture and English Cottage Style

For those of you who don't know about it, The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI is an awesome place to go and experience history. Part of the Enchanted Life is looking toward the past for inspiration. Not only is it a place to learn about history, both the museum and the village provide opportunities to be inspired for your own house.

The museum has a huge collection of cars, trains, and planes. But it also has collections of jewelry, pewter ware, old stoves and my favorite, the furniture collection:

Greenfield Village is also an amazing experience, with a variety of living history exhibits, as well as several hands on crafts for the kids (and grown ups too). However, for inspiration, one doesn't have to look any farther than the collection of historic house that have been decorated as accurately as possible. A walk around the Porches and Parlors District is a cornucopia of examples of period style from the 1600's to 1930's. My favorite is Cotswold Cottage, an authentic English cottage. Of course, on my last visit, I took tons of pictures.

And if you like tea, the cottage is also a "tea house" and the tea is served in nice fat teapots covered floral tea cozies.

My other favorite spot at the village is the Herb Garden. It very much has the feel of a "secret" garden: