It's two months before the opening of the Maridon Museum, and Mary Hulton Phillips -- the "Mari" in Maridon -- is picking nits with her architect.

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette At her Butler home in March, Mary Phillips was surrounded by some of her large ivory and jade sculptures, now in the collection of Butler's Maridon Museum, which she established to house her Asian art and German Meissen porcelain figures. Click photo for larger image. Maridon Museum Address: The museum is at 322 N. McKean St., Butler. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays . Admission: $4, $3 for students and seniors and free for children under 8, who must be accompanied by an adult. More information: 724-282-0123.

"I still have some concerns," said the 83-year-old Phillips, holding court from a chair in her living room. "The scholar's table is too high. Little kids won't be able to see it. Even little people."

It is Phillips' inheritance that built Butler's first museum, which opened last month, and it's Phillips' collection of Asian art and German Meissen porcelain that fills it. She is the hands-on president of the museum's board, and nothing is too large or small to escape her notice.

"Why not? My money," the irrepressible Phillips said with a smile.

The next day she will go in her wheelchair to the Monroeville Expo Mart on a buying expedition for the museum's gift shop.

"It's been fun," Phillips said.

Indeed.

The institution she willed into being is a gleaming little gem of a museum, a gift to its street, its city and its region. Here or anywhere there is nothing quite like it, offering an idiosyncratic introduction to Chinese and Japanese art through the eyes of an American collector.

About half of the museum's collection is on view in four galleries; most of the rest is in a study gallery for scholars and will be rotated into exhibits.

The wide-ranging Asian collection comprises more than 400 jade and ivory sculptures, tapestries, furniture, landscape paintings, scrolls and artifacts. The museum also houses more than 300 pieces of Meissen porcelain, one of the largest private collections in the country, with several pieces dating to the earliest days of production in the 18th century. The theme that unites these disparate objects and cultures is the human figure, to which Phillips was consistently attracted.

"They tell stories," she said. "The Meissen pieces are very humorous, and that attracted me."

For Phillips, the museum is the culmination of decades of community activism and philanthropy in Butler, where she was born and raised. In 1944, she married her neighbor, Donald Phillips, whose grandfather had founded T.W. Phillips Gas & Oil Co. and whose memory she honors in the last half of the museum's name.

"In a month he asked me to go steady, and two months later he asked me to marry him," Phillips said. "We were married for 50 years when he died" in 1994.

Her husband, she said, wasn't much for collecting.

"He collected canes, but only because I bought them for him."

His father, however, collected jade, which was displayed in the family home -- Butler's lordly Elm Court, the 40-room, limestone Tudor manor house designed by Benno Janssen and Roy Hoffman and completed in 1931.

Four decades of collecting

Phillips bought her first piece of Asian art around 1967: a finely detailed sculpture of a Japanese woman in traditional dress, carved between 1868 and 1912 during the Meiji period.

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette From Mary Phillips collection, one of a pair of 20th-century jade figures from China. Click photo for larger image.

"I was at an antiques show in Butler and saw this little ivory figurine and fell in love with her and bought her. The next year the same dealer brought another nice piece that I liked. I started to go to antiques shows," Phillips said. "Dealers got to know me."

And that is how, over the next four decades, she assembled her collection the old-fashioned, pre-eBay way, working through a handful of dealers who would bring pieces to her attention.

"I just started collecting for my own amazement. When I saw a piece and it was pretty and I wanted to live with it, I bought it. I never thought of a museum."

That idea came along three years ago as a way to use leftover space in a former auto showroom that she had purchased as the new headquarters building for the local blind association.

"It was more space than they needed. I looked at the track lighting in the ceiling and thought, 'That would make a good museum.' "

While the lust for a museum also grew out of her desire to see her pieces -- especially the big jades -- properly illuminated, the track lighting is long gone, thanks to Pittsburgh architect Paul Rosenblatt, who was hired to design an exhibit and ended up doing, as he modestly puts it, "a little bit more."

Rosenblatt, who founded Springboard Architecture Communication Design in 2001 and has a reputation for innovative exhibit design, also served as Maridon's architect, along with project designer Bill Szustak.

Their renovation, built by C.T. Dumbaugh Co. of Butler, transformed the car dealership into an artful building whose modernity is a foil for the opulent, ornate and often antique work it contains. The new section, facing North McKean Street, is framed by three walls of metal, glass and stone, which for Rosenblatt represent the three primary materials in Phillips' collection -- jade, ivory and porcelain.

The gently curving aluminum-paneled wall and the cast-stone wall draw attention on the exterior by extending beyond the glass facade -- a reference, Rosenblatt says, to the protective walls that surrounded ancient Chinese cities.

On the exterior, the facade's green glass is mostly reflective, throwing back images of mature trees and circa-1900 houses on the opposite side of the street. A few of the curtain wall's panels are transparent, offering selective views into the museum.

"The first thing I remember about Mary is her sense of humor," Rosenblatt said in March in Phillips' living room. "She told me several jokes when we first met -- some of which I couldn't repeat to my parents -- and I saw that in the collection. They are lighthearted and full of life."

Rosenblatt captured some of that spirit in the museum, inserting a tiny, protruding display window in the parking lot, reminiscent of a fast-food restaurant's drive-through window. Inside, the window becomes a small vitrine showcasing that first piece Phillips bought, cleverly framed by thin, glowing bands of natural light.

A good neighbor

For all its crisp edges, flat planes and contemporary materials, the Maridon nestles comfortably into its century-old residential neighborhood, in no small part because Phillips and her architects chose to buy, retain and refresh an adjacent frame house and incorporate it into their design. The cheery yellow-and-white house, with a welcoming, newly rebuilt wraparound porch, holds offices for the Maridon's director and archivist.

	Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette The Maridon Museum, fashioned from a former auto showroom and a turn-of-the-20th century house, is the work of architects Paul Rosenblatt and Bill Szustak of South Side firm Springboard. Click photo for larger image.

Keeping the house was an important gesture, Rosenblatt said: "We wanted to demonstrate that the museum is part of the street and the neighborhood."

Entrance to the museum is through the glass atrium, a long, ramped hall that connects the two buildings and showcases an exterior (now interior) wall of the house as a sort of very large museum artifact.

To the left are the galleries, showing the museum's inaugural, long-term exhibit, "A Collector's Journey." The title hints that the museum does not hold a comprehensive collection but rather one that reflects the evolution of Phillips' own taste, as she grew more knowledgeable about Asian art and culture.

Traditional Asian themes

The first gallery greets visitors with two large, 20th-century Chinese sculptures carved in jade -- a pair of peacocks adorned with peonies, the symbolic "flower of wealth" in Eastern cultures. These and most of the other big, showy, laser-cut sculptures in this gallery were produced by anonymous artisans in workshops for export. Their value in the museum lies in the traditional themes they introduce, said New York-based Asian art dealer Edith Frankel, who appraised the collection and helped shape it for exhibition.

"We went from the known to the unknown," she said. "You move back in time and start looking for threads that will take you to the religion and to the culture using art as your vehicle."

Many works are carved from ivory. Frankel said they were purchased either before the 1990 international ban on the sale of new ivory or imported with proper documentation. Still, nobody asked the elephants, and it's hard not to think of them and their poachers when standing before tall pairs of phoenix birds and Mandarin figures that retain the elegant, arcing shape of the tusks.

Although the Chinese themselves wouldn't acquire such export pieces, the exhibit is arranged as though one is visiting the home of an art collector in China: Contemporary work is displayed in the front room, with the older, more precious objects to be discovered later, if the guest is invited into private chambers.

The front gallery also contains two traditional Chinese landscape paintings -- one on silk dating to the 17th century and a large, ink-on-paper work commissioned for the room's long wall. The latter makes an impressive backdrop for the collection, which is set off by warm, lush pastel colors here and throughout the museum.

Subsequent galleries hold export objects as well, but there also are antique and contemporary pieces produced for Asians, including a carved screen, a pair of red painted cabinets and a group of 100 netsuke -- charm-like miniature carvings that Japanese men used as toggles to secure the pouches and cases that hung from their kimono sashes. The Springboard team shows them to good advantage in a grid format, with some backed by mirrors to reveal their reverses.

The museum introduces the role of the scholar in China in passing on the culture, with a presentation of a scholar's table outfitted with brushes, ink blocks, scroll boxes and other objects. A nearby time line shows the evolution of Asian art from Neolithic tools to the 19^th century, a story told mostly in jade and ivory.

The three Asian galleries form a U-shape around the smaller Meissen gallery. To link the two collections, Frankel suggested the acquisition of several objects related to Augustus the Strong, who ruled Poland and Saxony in the early 18th century. It was Augustus who pushed Germans to develop the first true porcelain clay outside Asia, and by 1713 his factory in Meissen was producing its signature work: the colorful, whimsical Baroque figures and vignettes that celebrate the life of the court and the commoner.

Temporary shows

The Maridon's inaugural exhibit is a long-term one that will be augmented with temporary shows in two small galleries/classrooms in the museum's education wing at the end of the atrium and behind the yellow house.

While the wall labels are helpful and docent-led tours are available by appointment, a visitor's understanding of the Asian objects in "A Collector's Journey" and how and why they were made would be enhanced by deeper interpretation, such as a guidebook. Because most Americans have a minimal knowledge of Asian culture, this museum will have to work harder on interpretation than most small museums.

That may come in time. Executive Director Sandra Lafe also plans workshops, lectures and other programming for adults and children, some in cooperation with the University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center. She also will be working to build a membership base and attract foundation support for the museum, for which Phillips is not providing long-term operating funds. Lafe said the community response so far has been encouraging.

The Maridon is well worth a visit, as is its little gift shop, stocked with useful, unusual and affordable Asian-themed items -- another example of the attention to detail that is a hallmark of this special place.

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Correction/Clarification: (Published June 25, 2004) The June 23, 2004 version of this story about the Maridon Museum inadvertently omitted hours and other information. The museum is at 322 N. McKean St., Butler, and is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $4, $3 for students and seniors and free for children under 8, who must be accompanied by an adult. Information: 724-282-0123.