A girl who drew house plans

Some people build a business from a plan. Christina McGarvey built one from a feeling she has had since she was a little girl, when her parents bought a falling-down Victorian farmhouse in Petersboro, Utah, with no money to fix it. Her mother wanted a beautiful home, so she learned to make one. The family hung their own wallpaper, laid their own wood floors and painted every room, and when her mother decided she wanted a four-poster bed, she found a lathe and carved one. Christina grew up inside that kind of resourcefulness, and she was the child sitting at the kitchen table drawing house plans for fun.

That love for homes took her east after high school, to a dream job with an English designer and a Utah State design professor at their firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, which is where she fell for British traditional design. Then she married a Scotsman, the full version with the ginger beard, the kilt and the accent, and every summer they went back to Scotland, where she wandered through architecture and antique shops that felt timeless in a way she couldn’t get enough of. None of this looked like a business yet. It looked like a woman with a very particular eye who kept looking.

Taste is something you train

I asked Christina the question I most wanted her answer to: can taste be learned? Some people are simply born oozing it, she said, but most of it is time and attention. You refine your eye by looking at things on purpose. Go to museums and galleries, go anywhere art is being sold, and study it until you can say what it is you love about it. Build a board of what speaks to you and try to recreate it. She compared it to the way I can spot a well-made gown from across a room. I wasn’t born knowing that. I learned it by spending years looking at designers, florals and fabrics as a wedding photographer, until the looking became instinct.

That’s what taste is, in the end: a long habit of noticing that eventually starts making decisions for you. And it’s why I keep saying taste is a strategy. Christina didn’t build her eye after the business worked. The eye came first, and the business grew around it.

The year everything changed

Christina and her husband Ross built their home just before COVID, in partnership with Established Design and Paragon Custom Construction, and entered it into a Parade of Homes year when only fourteen houses made it in. It took home the awards, and she started an Instagram account to send attention back to the people who had built it with her. A few creators shared the house, and she’d wake up to three thousand new followers overnight.

Then came what her family calls the year of death. Her younger sister died suddenly. Her mother died after three years with cancer, and her father, who had been quietly growing cancer of his own while he cared for her, died eight months later. Her uncle followed. Four funerals in twelve months, inside a brand-new house that was supposed to be the beginning of something. Christina is one of the most luminous people I know, and hearing her describe that year without self-pity was one of the most moving parts of our conversation. She also told me she believes the shop is a little bit her mom, nudging her forward to do her own thing.

Twenty wool throws

The business started almost by accident. Christina loved a Scottish wool throw and couldn’t find anywhere to buy it, so she tracked down the mill, and they told her she’d have to order twenty. She ordered twenty, posted the extras on Instagram, and they sold within an hour. Then the art staged in her home for the Parade sold, and she needed new art, so she went looking for original paintings that meant something, and her followers started asking her to find pieces for them too. On every trip to Scotland she visited every antique shop she could, slowly broke into the trade market there, and learned how to get bulk orders shipped home. For three and a half years she ran all of it out of her own house, until two upstairs bedrooms had disappeared under inventory and Ross pointed out that they owned an empty warehouse.

She opened Millcreek Manor in a corner of that warehouse in October of last year, with a holiday market as the grand opening. Then a call came from Euro Treasures, a Salt Lake antique shop that had been importing English antiques for forty-five years and had thirty days to empty its building. Overnight she had seven thousand square feet of antiques on consignment. Her first full container arrived this past May, 440 pieces that crossed the Atlantic on a thirty-day sail, rode a train from Houston, and came off a semi-truck in a two-hour race to unload. They cleaned, researched and tagged every piece, threw a container reveal party, and sold out in a single weekend.

Buy what you love

When you’re standing at an antiques fair at six in the morning, in the cold and dark with dealers waiting to be let loose, how do you choose four hundred pieces in a week? Christina’s answer is disarmingly simple. Her community follows her because they love what she curates, so on the first container she bought only things she would put in her own home. It worked, and it all sold. On the second, she let her audience widen her eye. People watching her stories would ask about a piece she’d walked past, and she’d look again from their point of view and see how beautiful it could be in the right room. Ten people telling her they would have bought the bookcase that sold first gave her the confidence to buy faster the next time.

She is honest that it isn’t all lightness. When two containers are sourced and nothing has arrived yet, the bank account gets very small, and the what-ifs come in. What if nothing sells? What if I just got lucky? She keeps those conversations with Ross, who is very good at telling her that eighty percent of it will be gone in a weekend, and then asking: and so what if it isn’t? What she shares publicly is the joy, because that part is real too.

Start before you know everything

Nobody trained Christina to be an antiques dealer. She learns as she goes, from mentors in the trade, from research, and even from a crash-course antiques guide Ross built for her with AI that can study a photo of an unfamiliar piece and teach her what she’s looking at. But her real method is the one she gave as her parting advice: you have to start before you know everything, and before anything is perfect, because it never will be. Find one small step toward the thing that makes your heart soar, take it, and let the momentum build. There is no book that tells you how to open a shop, she said. People open shops because they’ve curated things they love and want to share them, and that’s how it begins.

Near the end of our conversation I told her about a terrible date where a man asked me my passion in life and I said, honestly, to make the world a more beautiful place. He was not impressed. But I still believe it. Our homes, our little corners of the world and the beauty we put into them matter, and Christina has brought a great deal of that to Salt Lake City.

Brave Questions 1. What do I already love so much that people ask me where I found it? That question is often where a business is hiding. 2. Where am I waiting to feel ready? Christina started with twenty blankets, not a warehouse. What is your equivalent of twenty blankets? 3. Who is my Ross? When the what-ifs get loud, who helps you ask “and so what if it doesn’t?”

In this episode

• Growing up renovating a Victorian farmhouse with a mother who carved her own four-poster bed
• Falling in love with British design at a Greenwich design firm, and then marrying a Scotsman
• Building a Parade of Homes house and an Instagram following just before COVID
• The year Christina lost four family members, and how the business began in that grief
• Twenty wool throws that sold in an hour
• Whether good taste can be learned, and how to train your eye
• Taking over a 45-year-old shop’s inventory with thirty days’ notice
• How a 440-piece container gets from England to Salt Lake, and sold out in a weekend
• How she decides what to buy, and how her audience helps
• Handling fear when six figures of inventory hasn’t sold yet
• Using AI to learn a trade fast
• Why you have to start before you know everything
• The Millcreek Manor holiday market, November 20–21

Come to the holiday market (and visit any Friday or Saturday)

Christina has always wanted to bring the feeling of a European Christmas market home to Utah, and her holiday market is exactly that: a warehouse transformed into something that feels like an old hunting lodge or a candlelit tavern, with a brand-new container of English and Scottish antiques, guest vendors chosen for people who love beautiful things, carolers in period costume, Santa, and good food. It’s November 20–21, 2026, and this year it runs two days, because last year’s line wrapped around the building. I’ll be there, very likely in costume.

If you can’t wait until November, Millcreek Manor is open every Friday and Saturday until 4 pm, with new pieces released in Christina’s Friday drop. And if you’re not in Utah, you can still shop: they ship nationwide, including art and furniture. Search Millcreek Manor for directions, or shop at millcreekmanor.market.

Find Christina

Instagram: @millcreek.manor ·
Shop online: millcreekmanor.market, shipping nationwide · In person: Millcreek Manor Art & Antiques, Salt Lake City, open Fridays and Saturdays until 4 pm · Holiday market: November 20–21, 2026