Building a Village One Teapot at a Time

Theresa Romanelli has found much joy over the years in collecting china. As an avid tea drinker, Theresa is especially drawn to teapots, whether she purchases them herself or receives them as gifts. “When my husband, Ken, was semi-retired and traveling, he would always bring a teapot or two back from his trips, as he knew I loved them,” she remembers.

In 2013, the couple moved from Vermont to Arizona, which provided many new antiques stores and thrift shops for Theresa to explore in her quest for more teapots to add to her growing collection. “After my husband passed away in 2018, I filled some of the empty time with shopping for shelves and for more teapots to fill them,” Theresa shares. She discovered eBay and online shopping during 2020 when her three adult children—A.J., Adam, and Mary—insisted she shelter in place as much as pos- sible. As she spent time at home, she assessed her teapot collection and realized she had some wares that were shaped like cottages and other buildings. “It was then that the idea hit me to design a village,” she says.

Her spare room, which doubled as an office, was the perfect spot for this project. “Besides the original counter that is built in, there are at least 10 tables that I had or bought online. The most difficult part was find- ing tables that were approximately the same height,” Theresa explains. With the help of a glue gun, she skirted them with pretty fabrics—some even tea themed—and topped them with artificial grass and other fabrics that resembled greenways and pathways. “I just kept ‘building’ as ideas came to me,” chuckles Theresa, who says she used boxes of various sizes to achieve differing heights to add interest to her display. Although she procured most of the lampposts, shrubbery, and other accessories online, she says she could have obtained them from hobby stores that sell model railroad supplies if they had been open and she had been getting out. After purchasing a teapot shaped like a Catholic church, she decided to decorate another small church-shaped teapot with signage appropriate for a United Methodist church, even gaining permission from a
New York–based minister friend to use his name as pastor. And when her son Adam suggested she incorporate a mosque among the worship centers of her village, Theresa embellished a teapot of that general shape.

“I did this with a few other buildings, including the Jewish temple, the hospital, the children’s museum, and the firehouse, and I recently added a Quaker meeting house and a café!” But her favorite area is the last one she added: a farm with a U-pick-it garden and the horse farm in the background.

Although Theresa says she would like to expand her “Tea Town,” she readily acknowledges that she has run out of room and is grateful for the joy this pandemic pastime has brought her as she built her village one teapot at a time.