It sounds like the basis for a reality show in the vein of Antiques Roadshow or American Pickers: a Tennessee Catholic browses through antique stores and church sales around the country finding secondhand items to adorn the home chapel she is building on her land. It would be called … Vintage Catholic.

And that is exactly what Lindy Wynne did during the four-month construction of her family’s home chapel, named “The Chapel of Mary’s Mantle” by her 9-year-old daughter. Wynne is the founder and host of the Catholic podcast and ministry Mamas in Spirit, featured on EWTN’s “Best of the Rest” catalog of podcasts.

Home chapels are a booming business, according to a February Wall Street Journal report, though the WSJ’s piece emphasized the high cost such projects might run homeowners who desire their own sacred space. Lindy’s vision, however, aimed at what was previously owned or used. It was a vision interested not so much in keeping costs low, which it did, but it enabled Lindy to extend a bridge between brothers and sisters in the faith from the past.

“[These] are treasures to me, because they draw us closer to God and have been prayed with by many others,” Lindy said. “They point to what is unseen, yet is so real: Heaven.”

On family sojourns around the country, something invariably would catch Lindy’s eye. “The pews were $50 from a local church in Tennessee, the stained-glass window is from an antique warehouse in North Carolina, the old monastery bell from Texas, the Virgin Mary statue from Florida, and the St. Thérèse statue marked down to just $20 in a closing booth at a local antique store,” she said.

Private chapels have long been an element of the expression of faith. It was not lost on well-to-do medieval Catholics to carve out an intentional, and sometimes very elaborate, sacred space on their own property. Consider the Saint-Laurent Chapel, the private chapel for the Joinville family in France. According to Nicholas L. Paul in To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages, the chapel “occupied a position of extraordinary intimacy with the family.” We learn this is where the family encased memorabilia from the Crusades in addition to serving as a burial place for the family, and which also possessed relics of Sts. George, John Chrysostom and Stephen.

Unfortunately, like so much of Catholic France, Saint-Laurent was destroyed in 1790 during the French Revolution’s anti-Catholic Reign of Terror.

Even a descendant of the Joinville family, the knight Geoffroi de Charny, the first recorded owner of the Shroud of Turin, was known to travel on royal missions with a portable altar in his retinue. The Shroud itself was kept in the small church Charny built in one of his fiefdoms, south of Troyes.

Today, even small prayer corners or a simple stand of an icon or crucifix are common in Catholic homes. This is attested, for example, by the popular International Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Fatima.

For the Wynne family, “The Chapel of Mary’s Mantle” was inspired by their daughter’s Sunday School, which Lindy co-taught. “In class, when we prayed the Chaplet, Rosary or even had the children create a crown to place on the head of our Queen of Heaven, we would visit different Marian statues in our church,” Lindy said. “As the children’s little eyes and big hearts would peer up at Mary, we would talk about her mantle — the place of sweet, maternal refuge always available to them, regardless of where they may ever physically be in the world.”

In this way, the chapel’s dedication to the mantle of Mary evokes the Catholic tradition, particularly in France again, to name a church or great cathedral after Our Lady — Notre Dame. After all, Charny’s own church, which housed the Shroud, was also called Notre Dame.

“When our daughter suggested naming our chapel ‘The Chapel of Mary’s Mantle,’ it delighted me deeply,” Lindy said. “God seemed to make a lasting imprint on her precious heart — I believe her young self must have experienced the sweetness of Mary as her own Blessed Mother or, at the very least, she understood what we were trying to share with her and the other children in Sunday School.”

The idea was born to convert their shed into a chapel, “a hidden place to encounter Christ and his eternal love, as well as Our Blessed Mother, while on this earthly pilgrimage,” Lindy said.

A particular section of the chapel is devoted to St. Thérèse, where a prayer table holds intentions of family, children and friends who have visited, as well as prayer requests from Mamas in Spirit. “I put the prayers by St. Thérèse for her intercession. I think of prayer when I think of her,” Lindy said, recalling St. Thérèse’s quote, “For me, prayer is a surge of heart; it is a simple look turned toward Heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

“I share my chapel in the hope families will create a personal place of prayer in their own homes to remember to pray, to listen to God whispering personally in the heart of each family member and to know God is with them, always,” Lindy said.

The Wynne family chapel is still a work in progress. Lindy is thinking of painting the walls to reflect some of the different mantles found on Mary statues. To her, the experience provided an opportunity and space to “go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6-7).

Whether it’s a tiny closet under stairs like one of Lindy’s podcast guests or the full basement of a home like a dear friend, Lindy believes “God will meet us each in our chapels and transform us in the gloriousness of his love.”