b'The boxes I keep are the ones my kids and wife ask me to hold onto, Robert admits. I love all of them, each one in a different way. It is tough parting with them, however I take lots of photographs and eventually I get over it. It sort of feels like I did when my kids went off to college; still around but gone. Roberts customers consider themselves fortunate. He may strive to create three to four rooms a year, but thats just a personal goal. He sells on average two rooms a year, may give another to a family member, and keep one in his slowly growing inventory, simply because he cannot bear to part with it until space or demand provides the impetus to sell one. He also constructs several display cases and shadow boxes to donate to various local charities. Roberts rooms are not reproductions of actual rooms, nor do they purely represent a particular style orperiod of architecture. Rather they are timeless, elegant, well thought out designs that are a compilation ofhis memories and imagination. Each box incorporates various objects from my life that carry special meaning, Robert says. They might be a spittoon, a bowl of apples, a walking cane, etc. For instance, the box I am currently working on, Fitz Hugh Lanes Borrowed Studio came to me as I was researching his paintings. I was originally going to create my own version of his studio, located outside Boston in the early 1800s. However I later learned he painted several of his compositions in Castine, ME where the IGMA holds their international guild school each year. I thought, wow, this is too great to pass up! I changed my original plans in order to focus on a Federal-style living room with two joining rooms, featuring Lanes paintings of the harbor and of the actual house, which will serve as the window views. It may take years to accumulate just the right furnishings and accessories to stage one of Roberts vignettes. With dozens of ideas for roomboxes running through his mind all the time, he buys items where and when he sees them. Many times he will buy objects years before actually using them. And because his rooms come fully furnished with pieces from some of the worlds very best artisans, they sell for several thousand pounds. 9'