Living with heirlooms (and making them work)
Ideal Home Magazine
June 2020
HOW TO REALLY MAKE OLD AND NEW WORK
Ever wondered how to pull off that vintage-meets-modern look so effortlessly? Well for this month’s Interior Design Expert Advice feature for Ideal Home magazine, I persuaded three experts – an interior designer, an interiors stylist and a vintage furniture retailer – to share their insider knowledge. It seems, you can make granny’s sideboard work in your minimalist home if you really want to.
My three experts were – as always – so generous with their advice. I’ve worked alongside Nicky Phillips, Ideal Home’s decorating editor for several years and seen first-hand how combines old and new in her own home. Sandrine Zhang Ferron launched vinterior.co in 2015 as an online marketplace for vintage furniture – there are now over 150,000 different pieces for sale. Andrew Jonathan Griffiths is an interior designer who focuses on helping people create spaces that make them smile and improve how they live.
As Sandrine told me, ‘Go slowly when combining pieces – this way you can form better judgements about pairing items from a range of different styles.’ All three experts agreed, that if you really love a piece, then it should work in your home, whatever its age, but you do need to think about its position in a room, the colours and tones around it (such as painting the wall a dark shade, like Velvet Evening, above, Crown), and even how you light the piece. And yes, all three experts agree that it’s fine to get tough and get rid, or get painting…
“Make it the one and only intriguing or dramatic piece in a room – a finely-carved mahogany sideboard sitting alongside Scandi-style simplicity really can’t help but become the hero.”
You can read the full feature in the June issue of Ideal Home.