Justin Power of Pioneer Goods Co. // pioneergoodsco.com

-“The skulls I find on eBay. What I found, and this is a little bit of an insider tip, is that when you’re looking for things that have become a little trendy, whether it’s industrial salvage or taxidermy or animal skulls, if you use those buzzwords, the person who owns it understands the value. So when I go on eBay, I’ll just search ‘animal’ and see what comes up. And you’ll have to search through a lot more, but you’ll find a person who’s like ‘Oh, I’ve just got this animal skull. I don’t know—I’m going to sell it.’”

Justin power spent much of his childhood being dragged to yard sales and antique auctions. “My mom would trick me and say, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll find some old toys or an old baseball glove or something,’ and of course we never would,” Power laughs. “But now, doing what I do, it was all like impromptu training.”

-“I have a bunch of old American flags in my shop, and I just can’t keep them in stock. This one’s a 50-star, but I try to get the 48-star flags, or lower, because automatically that dates it back at least 60 years; it’s a little more interesting. [For] a lot of that stuff, it’s going to more hole-in-the-wall rural areas where people don’t have the appreciation for it, because there’s just so much of it around.”

That training has come in handy at Pioneer Goods Co., Power’s South End home decor and furniture shop specializing in high-quality reclaimed and refurbished Americana. Its rustic aesthetic also runs through Power’s small but impeccably decorated Malden home, which the newlywed shares with his wife.

“I like things that are old, that tell a story,” he explains. “I like to try to take my time and go to antique shops, thrift stores and markets and find that one-of-a-kind thing.” Every inch of storage space is filled with salvaged goods waiting to be reinvented.  A pile of lumber, picked up from an old church in Southie, sits in his front yard. One day, it will probably find new life as a table. “I can appreciate the value in that ‘trash,’ so to speak,” he says.

Take his coffee table, an old factory cart from Indiana. “It was used to haul around whatever junk they had in their factory for years,” he says. “Something was painted on it once upon a time, and all these spills and stains and stuff were part of what this thing did.”

Just about every item in Power’s home tells a story, and he encourages customers to tell their own stories through home design. “You don’t have to make your house look like a catalogue. That’s nice, and your house will look nice, but it’s not going to reflect your personality,” he says. “I’ll often tell people that even if they don’t know it, they have a style. From the way you dress to how you decorate. Try to hone in on that and then build it out from there. Stay true to who you are.”

Mistakes? You might make them. Power is sure he has. “Maybe you’ll look back and cringe, but it’s like, shit, I went for it,” he says with a laugh. “At least I didn’t play it safe.”

-“I was selling these [nautical figures] in my shop, and every time I would sell one, I’d kind of miss it when it was gone. These are something that kind of borders on kitsch, and maybe if I had 100 of them it would be kind of odd, but when you have two I think it works.” -“This is an old printing press tray; they would keep the letters in them. I started seeing them out at Brimfield at the big antique show, in bulk. I thought that maybe I’d repurpose it, or make a table top out of it. So I bought one and put it in my store to see if it would sell, and when we got married in October I brought it up to the wedding to use to put different messages in.”

Eric Portnoy of Room 68 // room68online.com

Eric Portnoy can trace at least one of his artistic awakenings—he’s had a few—to a Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol exhibit he visited at the MFA some years ago. “In the middle of the floor was a cardboard box covered in what just looked like dried-up puke, and people were all standing around it going, ‘This is hideous, this is ugly,’ but I just got it,” he remembers. “That it got people thinking and talking and it challenged them—that was really instrumental in [my] taking on new objects and new forms and being interested in art.”

That interest drives Room 68, the contemporary furniture and home design store Portnoy opened in 2011 in Jamaica Plain with business partner Brent Refsland. They’ve since opened a second location in Provincetown, and they recently closed the JP shop to focus on further expansion. Portnoy’s JP home—bright and airy, marked by bold primary colors and unique accent pieces that demand closer inspection—reflects Room 68’s attention to the melding of form and function, art and design.

“What I’ve specialized in is functional art,” Portnoy says of his home’s design. “It doesn’t have to be precious. I don’t want to live in a museum; I want to live in a home. But I also want it to be fun and inspiring, and it’s about finding that line.”

And while Portnoy is conscious of minding that line, his personal style is also about blurring them. “I like balances and mixes of material, whether it’s glass and metal, or fiberglass, whatever it is,” he says. “It’s always evolving, and I love that! I’m constantly playing and moving and balancing.”

These days, he continues, he’s all about taking chances. “I’m learning … to play around with color. Express yourself, be a little out there—don’t be afraid. My mother, the other day, said to me, ‘You are straight, right?’ ” He laughs. “It’s just what I like. It doesn’t make me more masculine or less masculine. It’s [about] not being afraid to step off a ledge once in a while, and be vulnerable.”

-“These are by a woman from France who’s living in Providence [Sophie Hones of DesignLaboratoire]. She makes them out of recycled bicycle inner tubes. They’re just so wonderfully sculptural, but also very utilitarian. You can throw your feet up on them; you can sit on them.”

(Left) “This [football] is a designer [Paul Cunningham of Leather Head] who I saw in New York and then at an American-made event here. They’re so beautiful.” (Right) Portnoy was out in Brooklyn with Refsland when he spotted this stack of egg cartons, bound with dirty string, on the curb. He lugged them around all night, across the Brooklyn Bridge and through barrooms, to bring them home to Boston. He plans to make a mold and use “some sort of lightweight concrete or foam material, still to be researched, that will create the form exactly but at a weight that is practical. A limited-number production [run will be] inscribed with the date, time and exact location it was found.”

Andrew Terrat of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams // mitchellgoldboston.com

Andrew Terrat and Steve Elbaz are so close, they practically share a home. The friends and co-owners of Boston’s Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams—Back Bay’s sleek home furnishing mecca—are both real estate junkies, which is why, when Terrat spotted the new townhouses going up in an industrial part of South Boston, he immediately put down a deposit on one. Elbaz put one down on the unit next door.

Ultimately, Terrat decided not to move in to the four-story townhouse—“I wanted something on one floor; I’m kind of lazy,” he chuckles. But he suggested they flip the units, selling Elbaz’s so Elbaz could move into the “better one,” which Terrat designed.

The spacious townhouse, marked by razor-sharp lines and polished surfaces, is “masculine, rich in color and texture,” says Terrat, who admits that his influence—neutral grays, interesting textures—is everywhere. However, as the apartment unfolds, you see signs of Elbaz’s own aesthetic, including vibrant pops of orange, his favorite color.

“Steve and I get along and we agree on most things, but he’s much more practical. I’m definitely more about wanting things to look great all the time—and I think this ended up being a really great combination of both,” Terrat says. “He usually covers the counter with a cloth because he doesn’t want to scratch the marble, and I’m always giving him a hard time, like ‘Oh, get rid of that cloth, it’s so beautiful!’”

“We use every room in the house,” Elbaz says of the home he now shares with his partner, Fernando Rangel. “It’s not like our parents’ house where we can’t go into that room, the fancy living room.”

And while practicality is key, so are calming details. “Our home also has to be a sort of sanctuary,” Elbaz says. A spiritually minded yoga buff, he keeps a Buddhist altar in the bedroom, where he meditates for 20 minutes each morning. Subtle Buddha sculptures similarly reveal themselves in tucked-away corners.

“Sculpture is fun because you can place it anywhere. It can be on a cocktail table, it can be in the hall, it can be on the floor and still look cool,” Terrat says. But he adds there’s no need to try to fill every nook. “Less is more—a few good things instead of trying to fill up a whole apartment with low quality. And add little things as you go. Your first place doesn’t need to be full. Right now a minimal look is really kind of a chic look.”

-Steve Elbaz’s friend Ramon Vega is the photographer of wall art above. “We needed something great for that wall, and he said he could print it out in any size, so we told him how big we wanted it, Steve picked the image, and it was perfect,” Terrat says.

(Left) The sculpture at left is a representation of La Calavera Catrina, an iconic image by Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada. Elbaz bought it years before meeting his Mexican-born partner, Fernando Rangel. “It’s a coincidence,” Rangel says with a smile. “It’s meant to be!” amends Terrat. (Right) “Steve goes away on Sivananda yoga retreats. He got me to go once—at first I was afraid of it because there’s a part where they do an hour of silence every evening, and I like to talk,” Terrat jokes. “So that really scared me, but I made it through!”