Incorporating inherited or recently acquired antique furniture into an existing décor can add warmth, pedigree and distinction to your home. Even if the old doesn’t technically match the new, there are dozens of tricks, tips and attitudes you can adopt that will bring the room together and make it a welcoming haven that beautifully showcases your style.

1)      Don’t try too hard. Matchy-matchy aspects can date a room and bring it down anyway, so why force parallelism between pieces that don’t match and never will? If you have a modern end table on one side of a sofa, don’t position your antique table at the other end. Put the antique table under a window instead. Let it have a place of its own.

2)      Be true to yourself. Hide nothing. A beautiful piece of antique furniture is a beautiful piece, no matter what happens to be standing nearby. Don’t cover a table—or any other antique furniture– with a blanket in an effort to blend styles. Rather, place a runner on the table with a color that picks up and plays off of other colors in the room.

3)      The same principle applies to throw pillows, knickknacks, wall art, and other movable splashes of color. You’d be surprised a how well a small but consistent streak of blue can tie an otherwise disparate room together.

4)      Be playful. Recognize that the flexibility of the room and the flexibility of your aesthetic can allow each to bring out the best in the other. Antique furniture from a certain period may not convey your exact style, but the way in which it entered your life says something about you. If this piece of antique furniture belonged to your grandma, remember that your grandma is part of who you are. Let the room represent all aspects of you, not just a filtered few. See what happens!

5)      Finally, remember the most important rule of interior design—if you like an item, then it doesn’t matter why. In some mysterious way, a group of items selected by one person have a common thread that binds them together, whether the thread is easy to identify or not. If everything in the room is yours, and everywhere the eye falls it falls on something that you find beautiful, then in some magic way, the room will feel comfortable, balanced and pleasing to others. Design, like any other art, is half science and half magic. Enjoy your new-old antique furniture, and have confidence in your instincts!

By Erin Sweeney

Edward Wormley; a household name in the Mid Century Modern crowd.  He was a major influence on American design.

Wormley was born in 1907.  As a young child, he developed polio, which hindered his ability to walk until the age of 5.  This would be a mere speed-bump in Wormley’s life.  In 1926 he attended college at the Art Institute of Chicago.  By 1928 he was working at Marshall Field & Co, then later for Berkey & Gay in Michigan.

Wormley’s first taste of furniture design was in 1930 when he traveled to Paris and met designer Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann.  Upon his return to the United States, he went to work at the Dunbar Furniture Company.

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As a longtime dealer and collector of antiques specializing in fine bakelite jewelry and objects, I’m basically a 20′s-40′s deco dude. I’ve always been drawn to mid century modern furniture, and I’ve studied and lectured about the all the classics; Breuer, Saarinen, Eames, Nelson…..but the quintessential purist machinist design aesthetic and the non-ornamental nature of most modern furniture left me a little under-done.

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Furniture…everyone has it and some even know how to decorate with it. As with any industry, antique and vintage furniture collectors have a lingo of their own.  I’ve picked out some common, and not so common, terminology I thought would be fun to talk about.

You might think to yourself, “Who are these people?” when you hear William and Mary.  This reflects a style of furniture that has Dutch and Chinese influences and was made from 1640 to 1725.  Queen Anne was a very popular period of style made from around 1700 to 1755 and refined William and Mary.  So what comes to mind when I say Chippendale?  Okay, but just know that Thomas Chippendale was a British designer and namesake for the style from around 1750 to 1790. This movement followed the Queen Anne period.  Chippendale style can be characterized by the Chinese, French and Gothic influences. 

Ever heard of Charles of London?  This term refers to a sofa or chair with rolled arms and is still used today.  Don’t confuse the rolled arms with a recamier, which is typically a sofa with a sloping back from a high end to the lower end, sometimes going as low as the seat itself.  These elegant pieces were also known as fainting couches and were quite the style in the Victorian era. 

If you hear the house was decorated eclectic you know there were different styles and periods combined harmoniously together.  The blending of various styles is considered to be transitional.

Patina is not limited to the green film on bronze produced by oxidation over a long period of time.  It may also be used to refer to the changed outer surface of furniture caused by polishing or wear and through age and exposure.  Not to be confused with scale.  That term is reserved as a means to describe how the size of various objects appear in relationship to one another in the space provided for them.

When a furniture maker turns something such as a table leg, they are shaping it on a lathe.  The “H” or “X” shaped brace used horizontally to connect the legs together is known as a stretcher.  The tester is a frame made of wood used to support the canopy over a poster bed.  A piercing refers to the cutout design on the splats of a chair back or other 18^th century furniture.  Splats are simply a vertical support piece in an open back chair and are generally decorated with carved designs.

As you can see, a period, adjectives, verbs, nouns and pronouns all have unique meaning in the antique world of furniture.  So, if you should ask your antique dealer where the commode is, please don’t be surprised or upset if they show you a late 17^th century chest of drawers with a smooth flat marble top that may have small doors on the front of it.