How to decorate with antiques, Part 3: The best ways to live with your antiques

As with any worthwhile endeavor, completing a bit of homework sets you up for the task at hand. In this case, the task is to display your growing collection of antique furniture, art, and/or accessories in your home. Defining your personal relationship with antiques and clearly understanding the type of antiques that appeal to you are the homework items that provide the springboard for displaying your collection. Here are the two best ways to live with your antiques:

1. Make them part of everyday life. This is my favorite motto and one that slips pieces from other time periods into the daily fabric of our lives. Antique chairs, sofas, dressers, cupboards, cabinets, tables, rugs…etc. all make wonderful additions to today’s home. The inclusion of a beautiful piece of distressed wood adds so much to any room, so use that table, dresser, or cabinet. Fill it with children’s clothing, electrical equipment or folded bath towels. The point is to wear these pieces and watch your appreciation for their beauty, craftsmanship, and layers of aging grow. Along with their beauty and practicality, these are pieces that were made for such use and, in my opinion, blossom into their true beauty when worn and enjoyed on a daily basis. With daily use comes the need for a well thought out and executed care and maintenance plan (waxing, polishing, tightening joints… etc) but this also happens with new parts (they don’t take care of themselves) so don’t additional work is required. Just a more focused and careful plan to extend the life of these parts along with their usefulness.

2. Put them on display. When collections of ‘little ones’ (tiny pieces, typically those easily held in the hands) are ready to be displayed, I prefer to group them to their best advantage. This can take the form of a cabinet or shelf set aside especially for a collection or it can be limited to one room in the house. You may decide that your kitchen is the appropriate place to display your English pewter collection. Export Ware’s growing collection could be a surprising addition to the library and the many vintage military toys you’ve been collecting for years could be arranged in a grouping of shadow boxes filling that long hallway or back stairs. I find that organizing collections in this way focuses attention on the collection in a way that having these pieces scattered around the house does not.

One thing you should always remember is that, with the exception of a very small number of museum-quality pieces, antiques should be touched, used, and enjoyed by all members of the family. I regularly advise clients that if they think twice about having the grandchildren play in a room in the house because of the antiques on display; it would be better to keep the antiques in boxes and enjoy your little grandchildren.