Decorating Apt. 11D with Vintage Furniture

In my last post about our lawyer’s bookcase, there was some discussion about whether people still are interested in vintage furniture.

I go to a lot of estate sales to find old books for my badly neglected Etsy shop. The dealers are lined up out the door. Of course, they don’t buy just anything old. They buy certain old things — good lines, well made, not destroyed. There was crap in the old days, just as there is now.

I don’t pay for my vintage stuff. It usually just falls in my lap one way or another. Hi, I’m Laura, and I adopt stray furniture.

1/3 of the stuff in these pictures is vintage, 1/3 is quality new (Crate and Barrell, Room and Board), and 1/3 is crap new (IKEA or Wayfair). Our dining room chairs suck. They’re $14 from IKEA. I think I’m going to upgrade to these. I just got that new table runner, on sale at Crate and Barrel.

The vintage prints came from my in-laws. I had reframed them in modern frames, but hated the look. I put them back in the beat up vintage frames, where they looked more at home. I like them hung asymmetrically. (But not crooked, like that bottom one, which needs to be adjusted. I took these pictures in about five minutes. No time to clean up and fix errors.)

The mirror was in my grandmother’s Bronx apartment in the 1950s. The buffet are two bedroom side tables pushed together. I found them on the street on trash day in New York City. Don’t look too closely at them, because they’re a mess.

Because we have a super white kitchen (excuse the mess in the background) and a mid-century modern house, I think we really need the old vintage stuff to give the house some character. I was in a new-build house a few weeks ago, and the whole place was white and light blue. I was redecorating in my head the whole time. The woman’s house DEMANDED some character.

Does anyone else redecorate in their head, when they’re in a particularly cluttered or bland house? I’m sure you all do, and it has nothing to do with some undiagnosed OCD on my part.