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Photo by Bob Pennell Tatyana Van Zandt, left, and Patrick Evans can't find room in their new house in Jacksonville for the thrones that decorated their Ashland home. Be king of your castle Oh, and there's a throne available for the queen, too By BILL KETTLER ASHLAND -- Ever wondered what it's like to be royalty? An Ashland couple can help you find out how it feels to sit on a throne. Patrick Evans and Tatyana Van Zandt paid $6,000 for two hand-carved, solid-teak chairs to decorate their home in Ashland. The chairs won't fit in the home they've bought in Jacksonville. They hope somebody will take them off their hands for $1,000 apiece. "They take a certain kind of house," said Van Zandt, a counselor at Rogue Community College. "It takes a lot of guts to own them," said Evans, "and it takes a whole room for them." The chairs fit just fine in the couple's high-ceilinged, Victorian house in Ashland. But they overwhelm the house Evans and Van Zandt bought in Jacksonville. Pioneer mason Patrick Fehely built the little brick house in 1868, with no thought of anyone bringing in chairs that stand nearly 6 feet high and three feet across. "We don't want to give them up," said Evans, "but we just have to." The thirtysomething couple saw the chairs in a California antique store just as they were preparing to move to Oregon and decided the chairs would be just the thing for their new home. "We had to have them," said Evans, a nursing student. "We had never seen anything like them. "We had them all set up in our `throne room."' They decorated the throne room with reproductions of gargoyles, broadswords, medieval tapestries and candles in wrought-iron sconces. "We'd sit and talk to each other over a glass of wine," said Van Zandt. Ornate carving covers nearly all the chair's wood surfaces. Lion heads roar out of the arm rests, griffins and other mythological birds flit across the high back, and clawed feet anchor the chair to earth. "We decided they were more important than having a dining room table," said Van Zandt. The 80-pound chairs look like they would be at home in a drafty European castle -- a look that attracted Evans and Van Zandt. "We're Europhiles," said Van Zandt. "We like the rough and raw element of what we imagine that time was like. "I think if we had our druthers we'd live in a stone house with 12-foot ceilings and a huge walk-in hearth." The chairs were made to look old, but they're relatively new. Similarly carved oversized chairs can be found in specialty catalogs for $2,700. "Let's face it," said Evans. "If they were authentic, they would be in Sotheby's." The chairs are big enough to remind an adult of what it feels like to be a child. "I'm five-nine," said Evans, "and my feet kind of swing off the floor when I sit in them." Evans wasn't surprised when a newspaper classified ad for the chairs failed to make the phone ring off the wall. "We didn't really expect too much activity," he said. No one had called by the time the couple finished moving last Friday. The couple hope they'll have better luck trying to auction the chairs on the Internet. "We're going to e-Bay (an Internet auction site that specializes in unusual objects). "They're really an e-Bay kind of thing." Anyone interested in the thrones may contact Van Zandt and Evans at 899-2226. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA