Tracy Sainte Marie loves vintage — vintage clothes, vintage shoes, vintage furniture. “I grew up wearing secondhand clothes my mom bought me, and watched her transform old furniture into beautiful decorative pieces,” she says. “It was amazing.”

Today, the stylish entrepreneur has taken that early education and appreciation for secondhand things and made it her business. With her business partner, Anna Fisher, Sainte Marie recently opened Re-Tale — a home décor and clothing shop on Burke Street where “every item has a story.”

Like the fanciful finds she sells in her shop, Sainte Marie’s home also has a story to tell. With her husband, Dr. Daniel Yohannes, director of drug discovery at Targacept, the couple has taken the old and made it new again. 

The 1915 Thomas-Stultz house in West End is a simple example of the Colonial Revival style that was popular during the first quarter of the 20th century. Its large wraparound porch with Tuscan columns, screened side-porch on the south side, and porte-cochere on the north side attest to the traditional architectural vocabulary of the day. 

Once inside, though, it becomes clear that traditional was left standing on the porch. With a healthy infusion of stylish modernism, the couple has taken the interior of their home — a straightforward, if not simple, American Foursquare style — and filled it with Art Deco and modern design elements, the kind that have been making a resurgence over the past several years.

No doubt the clean, geometric look is timeless. And in an age of computer equipment and flat-screen TVs, the strong lines of modern-retro and Art Deco furnishings blend well. Still, for Yohannes at least, the connection with modernism is more than skin deep. For him, a taste for modern design is flavored with a strong sense of pride in his origins.

Dr. Yohannes traces his roots back to the newly formed nation of Eritrea, a small country on the Red Sea, bordered by Ethiopia and Sudan. It is there, in the unlikeliest of places, that his penchant for modernism was born.

“When Mussolini came to power in the 1920s,” Yohannes explains, “he directed his architects to build him a modern city in the area of northeastern Ethiopia as he prepared to realize his vision of an Italian empire in East Africa.” Christened “Asmara,” Mussolini’s capital and symbol of Italian imperialism remains “one of the highest concentrations of modernist architecture anywhere in the world.”

Not long after a United Nations referendum granted Eritrea nationhood in 1994, Yohannes traveled to Asmara to explore starting a pharmaceutical business. While the government wasn’t ready for private investment from outside the country, the visit opened the doctor’s eyes to the beauty of modernism.

That same visionary spirit of introducing the new to the old led Yohannes to install a geothermal heating and cooling system in the couple’s older home, which was built before the advent of air conditioning and originally heated by forced-steam radiators. Today, antifreeze is recycled into the house from four 300-foot vertical bores excavated in the backyard. Taking advantage of the Earth’s constant thermal properties, the couple’s geothermal system is said to be 400 percent more   efficient on average.

In the end, an affinity for all things vintage and a passion for all things modern seem right at home with each other here. As Sainte Marie looks back to discover things from the past worth saving, Yohannes looks forward to discoveries that promise to enrich people in the future. Together, these partners and their passions seem to be perfect complements, side by side, in a home built by tradition.