After years of planning and saving, all those pieces came out of storage a few years back. And Muto used each with flair, designing and overseeing construction of a 4,000-square-foot apartment in Woodstock that showcases salvaged and restored antiques and other treasures. Each item has its own story, and Muto is happy to share it. "This came from a house in Elgin," she says, walking up the main staircase. By "this" Muto means the stairs and heavily carved newel posts she removed from a house that was being restored by an owner who no longer wanted them. Muto also salvaged the wood paneling that lines the stairwell - this time from an Iowa school.

For Muto, the restored wood antiques around which her home is built each have their own history. Each highlights an appreciation of the varying grains of life, the richness of our cumulative heritage and the ways in which the past can be remodeled to fit the present. "Use what you have," is her motto, or at least one of them. "Waste not, want not," is another. Of course, it also helps that her house is attached to her business, the Woodstock Colonial Antique Mall, and that she also owns an antique restoration business. "It's a perk. A big perk," she admits. "We have literally refinished everything in this house." And the house was designed around the specific architectural elements or antique furniture she wanted to include in her three-bedroom home. If she wanted a carved 1890s oak hall tree with pillars and a bevel mirror to sit in one specific spot, that meant windows, electrical outlets and switches needed to be placed accordingly - around the piece. "I built this place backward," she said, meaning furniture first, walls second. When the living addition to the mall was finished, it included an office, gardening room, kitchen/merchandise area and a garage. It also included a great room, full-sized pantry, dining room, game room, den and guest room suite, combined powder and laundry room, second guest suite with bedroom, sitting room and whirlpool-equipped bathroom, and the master bedroom suite with sitting room and master bathroom.

While the entire home is breathtaking, for Muto, it's also about convenience and durability. Style's a factor, but often only once the functional requirements are met. Her kitchen - a part of her great room - is a perfect example. Over in her baking area, an old post office counter serves as her work area with an adjacent maple cupboard housing all of her supplies. Everything's at arms' reach. The counter is topped with salvaged white marble, as is the top of the post office counter. When she's finished working, she can turn around and deposit the dirty bowls and pans on the gray marble workspace that houses her sink, cutting boards and stove. The gray marble was salvaged from showers being removed from a Chicago high-rise.

Another corner of the room highlights her function-follows-form approach. "I built that turret just for that light," she says, pointing to the hanging lamp, whose simple bronze bands encase a frosted glass piece in a revival style. "Even before I thought of moving to Woodstock I bought that. It's from the old Woodstock train station," she said. An 88-year-old electrician, who'd called the longtime antique dealer and salvage specialist to his house, had remodeled the station where it used to hang - in 1940. Like many people who hate to throw away perfectly good things, he saved the sturdy lights he was hired to discard. They sat in his house, in a box, buried beneath piles of other stuff for half a century. They stayed that way, in fact, until Muto had the foresight to ask, "What's in that?" The lights spent another 12 years in storage at Muto's place until she found a use for one of them.

It was during that time that Muto did most of her dreaming. In 1988, a fire destroyed her antique business and restoration workshop in Barrington, forcing her to sell her antique-stocked townhouse to start rebuilding her life and vocation from scratch. For nine years, before buying the building that would become the mall, she lived in one room of a Hawthorn Woods farmhouse that served as her new business and shop. That's where her dreams rose from the ashes like a phoenix. Five years after buying the mall, in 1997, Muto was ready to embark on construction. She took the original apartment above the building, reworked it, then tacked on the extensive addition. "This was a 1950s apartment that I turned in to an 1880s living quarters," she said.

A tour around just one of the rooms reflects that look. In her master bedroom, she has a full wall of closets. All of the oak doors hail from two salvaged antique priest's vestment cabinets she dismantled, restored and converted to her purposes. An oak chest of drawers was, in a previous life, a 1930s pharmacist's cabinet that now has a custom-made piece on top created by her own team of carpenters to house her television and radio. The eclectic mix of pieces in the room continues, though they all work together, to create the look Muto wanted. On one side of her 1880s high headboard and footboard, she has an 1880s square fretwork lamp table, on the other she has a marble top barber's cabinet with two drop doors where a barber would have stashed towels. Muto, however, uses the spaces for books. There's also a built-in dining room cabinet where she stores clothes in drawers and puts her "pretties," like glass or pottery. After years of dreaming, collecting and restoring, Muto's treasures finally have a home. "I had more fun building this," she said. "This is an unbelievable dream."