It would be easy to call Debbie and Wayne Goodwyn two of our favorite local antique dealers and be done with it. But they’re so much more than that.

As owners of East Nashville’s Wonders on Woodland, Deb and Wayne have created a store that doubles as a neighborhood hangout. The two-story yellow house-turned-antique store is always cheerful and welcoming – something that we think has as much if not more to do with the owners’ warmth and friendliness as it does their killer inventory, which spans at least a hundred years and includes one of the best (and most reasonably priced) mid-century modern furniture selections in town.

Equally impressive is the way Deb and Wayne are able to bring that same magic to their huge Victorian home in the eastside’s historic Edgefield neighborhood. The inside of the house comes across as intimate and cozy despite its extra-high ceilings and endless maze of rooms. Actually, the size is a good thing: where else are Deb and Wayne – he, a former corporate businessman born in Virginia; she, a semi-retired administrator at The Buntin Group, a local advertising agency, hailing from Georgia – going to fit over thirty years’ accumulation of idosyncratic folk art, cool vintage furniture, and the endless array of “smalls” that sentimental Deb can’t help but adopt.

Deb and Wayne complement each other in ways that are obvious – when they’re out picking, he looks for furniture, while she gravitates toward the aforementioned smalls and jewelry (Deb’s collection is amazing). But it’s the more subtle ways they play off each other that we find most endearing, like how they finish each other’s stories in the way all truly simpatico couples seem to do. And how they seem to truly appreciate and anticipate the others’ quirks and habits. It’s obvious that they’re best friends.

We spent some time with the Goodwyns in their home earlier this week, quizzing them about the origins of their collecting while Deb took us from room to room, giving the back story of practically every piece we passed. The tour was a feast for the senses, and the time spent learning about their past together an honor.

Imogene + Willie: When did you guys get married?

Wayne: I think it was 1830 – it seems like it! No, it was 1975.

Imogene + Willie: How did you meet?

Wayne: Debbie is from Eastland, Georgia, which is the home of Stuckey’s, where we both worked for a time. She was a switchboard operator, so every time you made a call in or out of the building, you went through her. I was working late one night and Deb and her best friend came up to me and started chitchatting. I’ll never forget it: Deb had her hair up in rollers and she was wearing a red flannel shirt. When she walked out the door, I said to myself, That’s the woman that I’m going to marry.

Debbie: I still have that shirt, but I think it was the curlers that sealed the deal.

Imogene + Willie: Talk to me about collecting. Who started first?

Debbie: Wayne and I both grew up with old things – not necessarily fine things, just old things. In my family, everything was about hand-me-downs. If you outgrew it, the next cousin got it – your bicycle, your clothes, whatever. We didn’t save things; we gave them away.

I’ve always loved jewelry. For some reason, my mother saved one of my tablets from the first grade. In it, I drew a lady who is wearing a bracelet – I have it framed over my desk at home today. So from early on, I loved it. My mother didn’t wear it, but I had an aunt that had a neighbor who had jewelry boxes that were just full. I’d play in them for hours.

But the jewelry collection is one of many. It only takes two of anything to start a collection, you know? I’ve just gotten into different things from different era over the years. I’m not picky: I’m just as happy buying outsider art as I am that kind of Sixties retro look. To me, really, it’s all about texture. It’s all about how something feels. You can feel the energy in a piece of wood on an old table. I love knowing its history.

Wayne: Deb has a story for everything in here.

Imogene + Willie: Has collecting been something you do together?

Debbie: In the beginning, it was really about finding fun things that we liked that we could afford to buy.

Wayne: We haven’t bought a new piece of furniture in thirty years.

Deb didn’t really start collecting until we moved to Nashville. I traveled all the time and for the first year or so she didn’t work, so the way she found her way around town was to go to estate sales.

Debbie: The main reason I went was to buy books because I read a lot. Then I started buying other things.

Imogene + Willie: Wayne, what do you collect?

Wayne: I don’t. I just move it. Pay for it. Hang it. Store it.

Debbie: Well, I always say I have a good eye for what to buy and Wayne is the spatial one. Something could be two inches or two feet and I wouldn’t know. I don’t have a good sense of that. I’ll come home and he’ll have moved the furniture around. But we both like Primitives. We both like Southern pieces. We’ve got a little of everything here. We used to joke that we should have a duplex: one side more country and one side mod.

Wayne: This house is actually a duplex. When our renters moved out in 2000, we decided to see how we liked living in a big house by ourselves. Eventually we just decided to combine them, but you can see that one side is more modern than the other. But it all goes together.

Imogene + Willie: Have you guys always agreed on what to buy?

Wayne: I’ll tell you a turning point for me. Deb’s uncle had a little country store in her hometown, where we lived after we got married. There was a candy case at the store that was in terrible shape, but Deb wanted it. Back then, I had an old Corvette – one the ones with a trunk. I told her that if the case didn’t fit in the trunk, we weren’t taking it. We managed to get it in, but, literally, three quarters of it was sticking out the back. I told Deb, “If it falls out, I’m going to keep driving. I’m not stopping.”

Debbie: I cried the whole way home.

Wayne: But we made it home with it. We had a friend refinish it for us, and it’s beautiful. We still have it today. It made me realize that you can take something that’s almost lost and bring it back.

It’s funny, but if you find something that you have a real affinity for it, you find a way to make it happen. I bought a corner cupboard in Lebanon one time that was so big it actually stuck out the back of our van two or three feet. I got it home to our house on Fatherland –this is back when East Nashville really was a pretty risky place to live – and I just sat on my front porch, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t begin to handle that thing myself. I couldn’t leave the van on the street, wide open. So I’m sitting there wondering what I’m going to do, and these two bum-looking guys walk by. I scream out, “Hey! You guys want to make twenty bucks?” It seems like if you’re meant to have something, it will work out.

Imogene + Willie: How did Wonders on Woodland come about?

Wayne: When we were first married, we decided we wanted to work together. Over the years, we’ve gone through different ideas. At one point we thought we wanted to have an ice cream shop called –

Debbie: D.G. Scooper!

Wayne: But after we moved to Nashville, Deb got a booth at [the now closed] Whiteway Antique Mall. I think that’s where she got the bug. Since then, she’s always wanted her own little shop.

Wonders on Woodland has been open going on five years. It took us a couple of years to get it up and going. But it’s a small price to pay for a dream.

Debbie: I worked full time when we first opened, so I literally worked seven days a week – at Buntin during the week and in the store on weekends.

Wayne: We’ve always done this for fun; now we do it as work. It’s like the name – you know, Wonders on Woodland. Obviously, the store is on Woodland Street. But Debbie’s vision has always been to have wonders in her shop –you wonder where they came from, and you wonder who had this …

Debbie: …. and how it’s a wonder that it survived all these years…

Wayne: … and how it’ll be a wonder if it makes a profit. Thank God we don’t have to buy groceries out of what we make or we’d be thinner than we already are.

Debbie: We get grief all the time for not having a website or being on Facebook. It’s not that we’re anti technology, we just honestly haven’t gotten around to it.

Wayne: Truth of the matter is, we do OK just plodding along. If we had a website, we might not be able to keep up with it. We don’t want to be a big shot; we just want to be who we are …

Debbie: A fun little place that people just happen upon.

Wayne: I worked with Cracker Barrel years ago. Back when Don Evans first started it, he wasn’t big on ads. He never advertised the gift shop, only the restaurant: he wanted people to discover the gift shop for themselves.

Debbie: Because when you have that discovery experience, it becomes yours. You have a little bit of ownership in the place that way. So I guess that’s what we are: a bit of a discovery.

Wonders on Woodland is located at 1110 Woodland Street in East Nashville. The store is open 11 to 6 Thursday through Saturday and Sunday noon to 5.

Call them at 615-226-5300. As for a website, well …

You never forget your first: