Mad for Madcap
The life-styled, tradition-loving Sunny Side of Jason Oliver Nixon and John Loecke By Cynthia Adams • Photographs By Amy Freeman
M
ad for the beauty and style genius of the Brits but cannot swing a junket to the U.K.? Then get thee to Madcap Cottage in High Point, M’Lord or M’Lady. It’s the next best thing to a visit to Bloomsbury and the only thing missing is a hackney carriage to whisk you there. (You won’t need a brolly or a bromide, by the way, because the sun never shone more brightly than on this Church Street design shop that occupies a former downtown pharmacy.) Decamp, and if you are especially lucky, you may be met at the door by rescue pooches Amy Petunia or Weenie, or the resident designers, Jason Oliver Nixon and John Loecke. Neither is British — both were born in the States in Florida and the Midwest, respectively. And, certainly, design lab partner’s Nixon and Loecke are much too young to have known the Bloomsbury set, yet their colorful aesthetic seems to have seeded and blossomed right inside this retail address. The effusive design and color of the art and literary Bloomsbury Group — or Bloomsbury Set — had a madly colorful aesthetic that seems to be directly channeled by the mad-genius design behind High Point’s Madcap Cottage Design Laboratory. If the plate-sized paper flowers in the window display (which change every
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
May 2015
O.Henry 65