<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Judy Garland's Childhood Home\nWith the Wizard of Oz star's life the subject of a Tony-nominated Broadway play, AD visits the Minnesota house where she spent her first four years\n\"This little farmhouse has been blown around like the house in The Wizard of Oz,\" says interior designer Marc Charbonnet, explaining that the 1892 clapboard structure that served as Judy Garland's childhood home in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, was moved twice after her family sold it. In the '30s, the owners relocated it to a site about a dozen blocks away. In the early '90s two members of the local community bought the house and eventually moved it to its current location on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, where it opened to the public in 2003, with an adjacent building that contains a gift shop, exhibits of Garland memorabilia, and the Children's Discovery Museum.\nAlthough very few of the furnishings in the house are original, Charbonnet says that he designed the interiors based on the fact that Garland's father, who was then manager of a movie theater in Grand Rapids, came from indigent Southern gentry, and her mother's family was working-class. Everything in the house predates 1925 and is a mix of family-heirloom-type pieces\u2014European porcelains, Axminster-style rugs, silver candlesticks, American Empire furniture\u2014plus \"modern\" touches, such as a Victrola record player in the living room that would have been \"the zenith of chic,\" Charbonnet says. \"I tried to find things that would have been sensible show-off pieces.\"\n\"The 1924 tea table, a gawky little piece, would have been the heart of a room full of charm and culture,\" says Charbonnet. \"The Gumms were very social. Frank was also the editor of the local society page, and an invitation to the house would have been considered quite a big deal.\" The hosts and their children needed no encouragement to sing and dance for guests, and the landing on the staircase provided a natural stage.\n\"Ethel also made all of her daughters' clothes as well as her own, quite elegantly,\" says Charbonnet, \"hence the sewing machine in the dining room so she could keep her eye on the children while she worked and they played.\"\nThe original cabinets in the Gumms' kitchen had been removed, and the museum lacked the funds to re-create them. But the vintage sink and stove are exactly where they would have been in the '20s. The floor is a reproduction of heavy-gauge linoleum from the period.\nThe theatricality of the public spaces on the first floor contrasts with the simplicity of the bedrooms upstairs, featuring davenport beds and sofas, rag rugs, handmade quilts, and vibrant wallpapers. Garland shared this bedroom with her parents, sleeping in a small child's bed like the one at left.\nDominant, as one would expect, are the music devices, including the wind-up phonograph pictured here, in the bedroom shared by Garland's two sisters, and the Victrola in the living room. Both played shellac records, which are rarities today, since so many were melted down during World War II. \"You get an incredible feeling just from the scale of the house that it was a happy place, one of excitement, where they slept, danced, read, and played,\" says Charbonnet."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/judy-garland-childhood-home-grand-rapids-minnesota-slideshow>