At Country Living Fair, retro design is totally current

If you have a lust for rust, the third annual Country Living Fair, opening Friday at Stone Mountain Park, should be just your cup of (sweet) tea.

More than 20,000 lovers of decor and fashion accessories with a vintage vibe are expected to descend on this weekend’s sprawling marketplace after 16,000 attended the premiere event in 2010 and 19,000 came primed to spend last year.

Here is but a small sampling of the items the 150 exhibitors from across the country will be peddling: painted period furniture, new pillows with retro-style fabrics, colored Ball jars, vintage European nightgowns, necklaces dangling repurposed locker tags or keys, wooden bread bowls, time-softened wool blankets, rolling pins that appear to have rolled more than 100,000 miles, old black and white photos of families you’ll never meet, sock monkeys, butcher shop paper cutters, and flash cards, pull-down maps and anything else used in an American classroom circa 1965.

Sarah Gray Miller, Country Living magazine’s editor-in-chief, often ponders the ongoing rage for all things retro in her job programming the namesake magazine and organizing its fairs (which launched in Ohio six years ago).

“People want to own things that have meaning, that are personal, that have stood the test of time.” she said. “I also think that just as a culture, we so overdosed on all that sleek modernism for a while. It was too much of the poured concrete counters and molded plastic chairs. People now are looking for a warmer, more eclectic look.”

Miller pointed out that country-inspired decorating differs in different regions of the country, that preppy New England style is different than the Midwest farmhouse look, for instance.

“In the South, country is translated in a different way,” she said. “It has a lot to do with rocking chairs and porches and iced tea.”

A Mississippi native who said she enjoys hearing the frequent use of “ya’ll” when here for the fair, Miller is far from a detached observer at the event. She’s hauled or shipped many a find back to her home in New York.

In fact, she reworked her kitchen after buying a large trading post sign, bathed in multiple green and red hues, at the first Atlanta fair.

“I pulled those colors out and decorated,” she said. “It really sort of spurred the look of my whole kitchen.”

Miller believes that consumers are getting more comfortable about making old meet new, or vice versa, as she did.

“It used to be that people were either antique freaks or everything was brand spanking new,” she said. “And now I think people do have that confidence to mix and match, to maybe get the comfort from a piece from Ballard Designs or Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel and then to give that piece character and personality (by surrounding it with) found objects.”

To help festival-goers with such choices, the Country Living Fair also will present talks and demonstrations by experts in decorating, crafting and cooking, including treasure hunter Cari Cucksey of HGTV’s “Cash & Cari”; Miller Union chef Steven Satterfield; and Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge of the Cooking Channel’s “Fabulous Beekman Boys,” a reality show about a gay big-city couple who take over a rural New York farm.