The fun and the fabulous

The first thing a visitor might notice at the Abo house, set on a quiet, dignified street in Cherry Hill, is its second outdoor mailbox. Shaped like an airplane, it sits suspended on a pole above the other box and says simply "Air Mail."

Nearby, a small "Beer Garden" sign points to bottles planted upside-down in a cluster of shrubs.

And then, there's the notice that reads: "In 1897, absolutely nothing happened at this location."

Very soon it becomes very clear that Jane and Marty Abo's home is not your run-of-the-mill suburban retreat.

It grows even more obvious when you step inside and, after some disorientation, recognize that they have switched indoors and outdoors, so the illusion inside is that you're standing in a courtyard, with awnings and bricks. It's trompe l'oeil - fooling the eye - Abo style.

"We like to laugh," says Marty. A South Jersey CPA who often testifies in court disputes, he is serious about his work. But he can't resist having a fake overturned coffee mug, with puddled spillage, as the receptacle for his business cards.

You get the message: The Abos not only have quirky senses of humor, they also adore drawing others into their zany domestic world.

"I met Marty at a party at C.W. Post when I was a theater major there, and something clicked," says Jane, a pixyish woman with a megawatt smile. "I guess that's why I married him."

New York native Marty migrated to South Jersey for his accounting career, and the couple married in 1977. Their first home was an ordinary apartment in Maple Shade, their next a slightly funkier place in Cherry Hill.

When they spotted their current home, a builder's spec house, they liked the location but weren't crazy about the overall design and had a limited budget.

That's when Marty and Jane began seeking the whimsical, the sometimes wild, and, almost always, the unexpected.

"We definitely didn't do what our friends did - go out and buy sensible furniture," recalls Marty, whose eyes still twinkle at the notion that this house was never going to be conventional.

Their sons - Ben, now a physician, and Zack, now an executive in the music business - grew up in a world that could not be called dull.

How many kids have a living room sofa designed to take the form of a 1959 Cadillac sedan? Or an old phone booth and a genuine traffic light?

Sit down on the family room's sectional and suddenly a reindeer is nodding at you and singing. (Motion in the room sets him off.)

Look around and you may notice statues of three hefty sumo wrestlers serving as the base of a coffee table - unless you've been distracted by pillows emblazoned with "We got rid of the kids. The dog was allergic."

In the kitchen, cabinet pulls are actually repurposed spigots from Home Depot; a store mannequin in a slinky red dress has been transformed into a floor lamp.

Whimsy is sprinkled throughout the house: Signs announce "Apartment for Rent" (the boys' empty bedrooms); a combination safe occupies a corner of the master bedroom. Near the kitchen stands a larger-than-life chef, outlined in lights.

"I carried that out of a restaurant in Manhattan, then could barely transport it," says Marty, who, like his wife, doesn't hesitate to ask whether he can buy store fixtures that appeal to him. More often than not, they succeed.

In the dining room, a table customized to fit Jane's diminutive stature bears the legend "Very Expensive Table," a humorous homage to those who drop the prices of their possessions.

"They're worse than name-droppers," says Jane.

Perhaps most striking are the house's inside/outside foyer and surrounding walls. Determined to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the couple worked for several years with Erin Weaver Posner, who created faux-brick walls as a permanent element.

"We didn't want the beautiful, we wanted the real, blotches and all," says Jane, who works as a student supervisor at Cherry Hill High School East.

The laughs keep coming in the guest room. Done up in pink tulle and froth, it was an antidote, Jane says, to her all-male world (although one of their three frisky dogs is a female). Hanging as wall art above the circular bed are a tremendously oversized bra and panties.

Lest anyone think this couple don't take home seriously, they are also a family where major Thanksgiving dinners are a tradition, along with Passover seders. Friends love to gather in this domestic version of a fun-house, minus the crazy mirrors.

The Abos are clearly intelligent, thoughtful people who simply love to live in a world that's a little off-center and wacky.

The final evidence of the family sensibility is the adorable VW Beetle convertible parked in the driveway. Take a second look, and you realize it has sweeping eyelashes painted over its headlights.

It's almost impossible not to leave smiling.