At home with Scott Shields

Scott Shields lives inconspicuously, if not elegantly, on a quiet, tree-lined street in Land Park. Petals from an old camellia bush are splattered on his front steps. Outside his retreat, there are automobiles, leaf blowers, electric street lamps, cable TV lines and friendly neighbors, their lives furnished by the clutter and discord of current events.

That's outside. A vague, faint neon hum.

Inside, it's another story. No, inside, it's another time, another world – preserved in an amber glow.

Shields is chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum, which does not take its claim as the oldest museum in the West lightly. A private person on stage in a beloved public landmark, he is much more comfortable arranging Chinese snuffboxes than being on exhibit himself.

Shields lives in a two-story, three-bedroom house whose architectural style he identifies generally as being Cape Cod, circa 1930. In his dreams, he would be living in a mansion designed by Greene and Greene, Bernard Maybeck or Julia Morgan, a shingled treasure from the Arts and Crafts movement, where the handiwork is inspired, the fluid forms art nouveau.

"Turn of the century – everything!" he says of his absolute passion for an ethos, an era, 1890-1910, which he labels "the last gasp of Victorianism."

He has done an admirable job in approximating that period here: carpets, linens, tulip lamps, oak furniture, glassware, ceramics, walls heavy with somber, nearly impenetrable landscapes in gilded frames. Shields looks around and sheepishly laughs, "I'm sort of living in a museum."

Implicit in the decor is the unspoken edict – don't touch, don't get too comfortable, please dust.

Throughout the house, a precaution, an insulation, the shades are kept closed. The light, suitable for a migraine, is even, subdued, archival. The world outside rarely intrudes; time itself is pleasantly paused.

Shields walks into the dining room. The table is a Duncan Phyfe facsimile. The table, like much of the art and antiques, he bought while in graduate school. He removes a huge vase of hydrangeas. Last summer, they must have been spectacular. Now the array of blooms is withered, brittle, lushly morbid.

Sylvia, a luxurious Siamese-Manx, curls in the kitchen and emits a muted yowl. She is 18 years old.

"She can't jump on things any more," he says. "One day, while walking across the kitchen, she just fell over. She looked up at me as if to say, 'Why did you knock me down?' "

He regards her with fondness and pity.

"Now she's an antique, too," he says.

Scott Shields turns 40 soon. He is mock-vexed about an impending midlife crisis. That might entail a sudden affinity for Impressionism, which is unlikely. He cannot stand bright colors. Or effulgent scenery. He is tall, slim, pale, faultlessly polite, with blue eyes, sandy features, and a soft, gentle voice that seems fingered in white cotton curatorial gloves.

Of his splendid collection, his obsession for an era, he admits, "I'm living in the wrong time."

It is both a lament and a profession of faith.

Scott Shields grew up in central Nebraska, in a small town called Doniphan with 180-plus population. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father raised corn and cattle. Though born on a farm, he was not, in any conventional sense of the term, a farmboy.

"When I was 7 years old," he says, "I had this revelation. I told my parents that I wouldn't do (farm) chores anymore. But that I would do small jobs."

The miracle is how he cultivated a love of art. He had no gift of drawing. There were no paintings in the parlor. There were no galleries in the town. He was scared to take a class in art in high school, worried that something so subjective might imperil his sterling GPA and his goal of being named class valedictorian (which, out of a class of 27, he accomplished). In fact, it wasn't until Shields went away to college that he visited a real museum for the first time.

But, boy, did he collect things – rocks, stamps, coins. Even Matchbox cars. Here his true, acquisitive nature revealed itself. "I always wanted to keep things clean and pristine," he says of his bedroom displays. "So, I think I was made to be a curator. Though at the time, I did not know what a curator was."

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Bob Sylva, (916) 321-1135.