When it's dark outside and the lamps are on, that's when it feels right to Amanda Burgess-Proctor. That's when the 1923 bungalow on 14 Mile returns to what it's always been, the word she goes back to time and time again in our conversation: a home.
This is Dee Dee's Fine Vintage, where everything has a past… and some things, Amanda will tell you, have a way of following her home.
For twenty years, Amanda was a criminologist and university professor - a national expert in domestic and sexual violence, an advocate for women, and a social scientist who published, worked with legislators, and drove research at every level of policy she could reach. It was work that mattered to her.
"I don't think anybody completes a PhD and earns tenure if they don't feel called to it," she says.
Then in 2018, her middle daughter Maya was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. That brought months in the hospital: chemotherapy, surgeries, the whole terrible apparatus of a child fighting for her life.
Amanda took family medical leave and showed up, every day, in every way a mother can.
"Having a child with a life-threatening illness fundamentally changes a person," she says. "Just period."
Maya recovered. Amanda went back to teaching. Then COVID arrived, and with it a particular cruelty for families who had already lived through medical isolation. The hand-washing, the fear, the sealed-off world — it was all too familiar. "That was just so uniquely traumatizing," she recalls.
Add that to the ordinary weight of parenting through a pandemic, an older daughter struggling with her mental health, and two decades of research that required her to hold the worst of human behavior in her hands every day.
Something gave.
"I had a breakdown," she says. "I took a one-year leave of absence. I had every intention of going back." But during that year, the old Amanda was “reassembled as a new version," she says.
It began when she started fixing up furniture in her garage. "It was therapeutic," she says. "One thing led to another."
A name appeared in her mind, then an idea for a logo. Her mother-in-law, a seamstress, offered to make pillows. She held an open house in the garage… and sold out.
Her husband suggested she look at a house on 14 Mile in Clawson she'd overlooked. She walked in and got goosebumps head to toe. "I just get feelings," she says. "I've never been led astray by that."
Dee Dee's Fine Vintage opened in November of 2021. By February, she'd resigned her faculty position.
"It was the single most terrifying decision I've ever made in my whole entire life," she says. "Because I knew it was permanent. No university is going to be like, 'Oh, she left a tenured faculty position to go paint dressers? Let's hire her back.'"
The shop is named for her mother Diane — Dee Dee to those closest to her. She passed her love of antiquing down to her daughter... along with the gift of making people feel at home.
"When I was in high school and college, if somebody was going through something, they always felt at home at our house," Amanda says.
It is, word for word, what she hopes people feel when they walk into the shop.
A former colleague visited to tour the space not long after Dee Dee's opened. As Amanda described what she did — the provenance research, the history of each piece, the stories she'd tell customers about where a table came from and who had eaten around it — he stopped her.
"He said, 'I think you're telling people's stories, sharing them with others so those stories can be heard and understood.'" She pauses. "I had never thought about what I was doing that way."
The criminologist's eye is still there. She gravitates toward pieces with documented histories. She spends hours tracing manufacturers. She's identified people in antique-shop photographs and tracked down surviving family members to return them. She carries a black light flashlight everywhere she goes, hunting for the glow uranium glass gives off when you find it.
"Now I research things that don't break people's hearts," she says. "And don't weigh on mine."
She works harder at Dee Dee's than she has at anything in years. The difference? It doesn't drain her. Her daughter noticed before she did. Six months in, the girl looked at her mother and said: Mom, it's so nice to see you so relaxed and happy.
"When you're feeling this," Amanda says, "it just oozes out your pores."
She tells every customer who walks in with an old piece they can't decide what to do with: “Life is short. Use the good stuff.”
It was her mother's philosophy.
So if you ever see the lamps on at Dee Dee's Fine Vintage, just know someone who spent twenty years studying what breaks people is now focusing on what can be restored.
And in that pursuit, she's right at home.
Dee Dee's Fine Vintage is on 14 Mile Road in Clawson. For more info, visit deedeesfinevintage.com or call (248) 780-1700
"Now I research things that don't break people's hearts. And don't weigh on mine."
"It was the most terrifying decision I've ever made. Because I knew it was permanent. No university is going to say, 'She left a tenured faculty position to go paint dressers? Let's hire her back.'"