Starstruck: Star Boxes are not perfect. They are all different. Star Boxes are a little off-center. They always have at least one star in the design.

The above poem, or disclaimer, or caveat, or what-you-will, is printed on a small card that accompanies each of Jackson interior designer Michael Grogan's signature tabletop boxes.

Selecting just one adjective to describe his collection of custom-fabricated boites is as difficult as picking a single adjective to describe the artist and designer himself. Colorful, whimsical, humorous, old-soul, and younger-than-springtime are good words with which to begin.

The boxes themselves had an unusual beginning.

"Well, it all kind of got started back around 1990," Grogan recalls. "My dear friend Charme Tate and I were sitting in Primos, trying to come up with a contribution to a silent auction for a local charity. I had this little set of unfinished nesting boxes I'd ordered from a toy catalog, and we just kind of decided to play around with decorating one. We did it, someone bought it, and, well, Star Boxes were born!"

Shortly thereafter, Grogan premiered a few more of them at the first St. Andrew's Designer Showhouse. Fabric designer Judy Ford, now of Oxford, was one of his first clients. A savvy businessperson as well as a fine artist, Ford counseled Grogan to document his work photographically. He also copyrighted the product and registered the name with the Library of Congress. And then he began to take orders.

"Most of my boxes are done for specific clients with definite loves and special affinities they want represented on their box," he says, "and so, naturally, no two are ever remotely the same."

Grogan has donated Star Boxes to many fund-raisers for good causes, such as the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Blair E. Batson Children's Hospital in Jackson and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel. In all, he has produced around 180 of them.

"I'll tell you what really gave me the initial inspiration," he confides. "It was a project of mine, way back in my art-school days at Virginia Commonwealth. Our assignment was to do a tableau illustrating a children's story that had never been written. We had to make one up and design a two-dimensional presentation to illustrate it.

"Well, I decided to make mine three-dimensional. It was in a 13-inch-square cube. It had moving parts--for instance, a row of sprouting carrots. There was a little baby rabbit in a basket, and that represented my son, Patrick."

The notion of working in three dimensions, rather than on the flat surface of a canvas, became a passion of Grogan's. Paint is an expressive medium, but he wanted to incorporate more; his works often feature architectural fragments, old icons, figurines, folk art, and even a piece of an old lightning rod.

Jackson silver artisan Jane Chauvin Johnston has fabricated several custom finials and embellishments for boxes.

"She is wonderful!" says Grogan. "I sent her a color copy of a Mexican artifact--an angel wing--that I wanted reproduced, and she came right up with a beautiful one."

Angels, elephants, horses, sheep, flowers, fruits, jewels, geometric shapes--there is no telling what will appear on the next Star Box. But one thing is certain: there will always be "at least one star in the design."