Filled with surprises

Jeremy Olsen’s home is teeming with stuff: defunct signage and flea-market artwork, nonfunctioning clocks and paint pan as sculpture, found items like the pagoda-top silhouette that sits on his fence, and a strangers’ family photo on his bedroom wall.

The riot of colors, textures, eras, and styles somehow works in harmony inside his Sharswood home.

While the objects are from the past, Olsen, 52, said how they’re arranged represents who he is in the present.

Olsen, the owner of former Queen Village vintage store RareCo and current contractor under the same name, admitted that about 250 pieces were removed from the house before The Inquirer came — such is the level of his tinkering.

“A new thing goes in and something comes out everyday,” he said. “It’s an obsession, almost an illness, in that it has to reflect a version of myself that feels the most recent.”

When Olsen purchased the Sharswood rowhouse for $190,000 in 2017, he fell in love with its original details and planned to fix it up as an investment property. But soon after work began he changed course to a full gut renovation for safety reasons. He decided then, after 15 years of living in a constellation of Philadelphia neighborhoods, it would be his home.

It was the start of a four-year renovation that “almost did me in,” Olsen said, as he rotated through two general contractors before taking on the role himself. Although he swore off returning to his early career work in contracting, he found some joy in the renovation process once he took more control.

Toward the end of the renovation the RareCo store’s landlord listed the building for sale, leading Olsen to shutter the store. It freed him up to return to contracting. That business, RareCo Painting & Decorating, uses many of the tradespeople he worked with to make over his house.

Olsen’s finished home, for an all-in investment of about $275,000, he estimates, including the price of the house, is full of practicalities alongside romantic touches. It all keeps Olsen on his toes, literally.

“Sometimes I like to have things that are precarious,” he said. Case in point: a wooden man that hangs above the entrance to his powder room. When he opens the door every few days, it hits the man and the man falls on his head, “but I won’t change it.”

“There’s a fine line between it being a laboratory and livable,” Olsen quipped.

His other favorites throughout the house include an oversized sign of a woman’s face that anchors the upstairs living room, which came out of the warehouse that now houses Kalaya. There’s the vibrant painting of a sharpshooter with all the finesse of a grade-school artist. And he notes an abstract painting above the couch he won at auction, against a fellow collector he respects but with whom he often competes.

Olsen said he often makes mistakes when moving things around. Sometimes items become “too blendy,” in that the individual pieces no longer stand out to him. It’s the gift of an aesthete, he says, a characteristic he developed coming from a family of fine artists, including his brother and dad whose work hangs in the house.

His collecting is also an inherited trait, as his grandparents amassed folk art and his parents accumulated Victorian antiques. Olsen started his collecting habit with signs, but now specializes in what he calls primitive items — collector-speak for pieces that are often handmade and time-worn. He has a knack for placing found items, or pieces from the street, in the fold as if they’re fine art.

When not plucking things off the street, Olsen sources pieces from markets, like Massachusetts’ legendary Brimfield Flea, as well as auctions. And he reaches into his Rolodex of industry connections.

How does he decide what makes the cut? Olsen is excited by items that he calls “wrong-headed” or things that he barely likes. If he can figure out how to work them into the house in an appealing way, “there’s something magical to that.” Brands and value don’t interest him.

One of the largest undertakings of the renovation was adding an airy third floor with a sitting room, and an exterior door to a deck with a spiral staircase to the roof.

“This is an interesting place because I do come up here, and it’s arresting, but it’s also contemplative,” Olsen said. After weaving through his Wunderkammer of a home, the deck and its view onto the sparse and pristine campus of Girard College is a visual reprieve.

He added, “It’s almost like being across from an ocean.”

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