Rejena Carreras is one colorful woman.

Her Fan District home explodes with color, from the cherry-pink living room walls to the tangerine kitchen. So it's not surprising to find bursts of color adorning her makeup table. A ribbony scarf in three shades of red shot with metallic thread drapes over the table top. An elegant glass perfume bottle with an orange stopper sits nearby. Oversize sparkly eyeglasses recall a longago New Year's celebration. A pottery fish holds a dozen or so cheerful yellow flowers in his open mouth. Even the pearls that spill out of their own wooden jewel box are colored white, gray, and black. (And, yes, they're from the shop that Carreras and her late husband, Bill, turned into Richmond's favorite jewelry store.)

But it's the table itself that's the real star.

"I bought it years ago at a VCU woodworking show," Carreras says. It was a graduate student's masterwork. Its rubbed surface shows the honest grain of the wood. No single plane is what you could call flat: edges slope down toward the center; legs bow out and come back in again. The mirror perches at a crazy angle. (Happily, it's adjustable.)

"Look at this," says Carreras as she slips open a drawer. The craftsmanship is flawless. The drawers, whose undulating drawer-pulls emerge organically from the fronts, slide silently, wood on wood, no metal to be seen. The joints are seamless. This is quality work.

A visitor's eye is drawn to a pair of crimson lips just to the left of the makeup table. The lips – actually a purse by Timmy Woods – were a gift from Bill, pictured in his Benedictine High School uniform on the table top. "Aren't they fabulous?" Carreras asks, indicating the purse and its companions. A fish purse recalls a public art project some years back. "When I wear that one," pointing to a third purse, a nude torso in highly finished wood, "I find that people just have to touch it," she says, laughing.

A monogrammed silver mesh evening bag and a beaded flower purse, both from years long past, frame the table. "Isn't it sad that someone didn't love them enough to keep them?"

Snickers, formerly of the Richmond SPCA and now one of several cats in residence at the Carreras household, wanders in for a visit. He rubs up against a Ken Willis jewelry box. Like so many of Carreras' treasures, it was purchased at a Visual Arts Center Craft and Design Show. Carreras sits on the Visual Arts Center's board of directors, as well as the boards of the Richmond Ballet, SPARC, and the Arts Council of Richmond.

What advice does Carreras have for beginning collectors?

"Buy what moves you," she says. "Don't buy it because it works. If you love it, if you're passionate about it, then it will work."