Vintage not only means old or elegant, it also means full of memory and story. Our house is filled with such things. We built our current home last year, 2025, on a three acre piece of land in rural Pennsylvania. When designing the home itself, we took note of the existing older vintage homes in the area, providing pictures to the foreman on the worksite. "Make it look like this" we would tell him. He did, and when he was finished he gave us the best compliment we could have hoped for. "It looks like it belongs here" he said, "like it has been here for years."
We also designed it to contain our vintage things, the things that have memory and story. A visitor enters through double doors to the entry foyer, which we designed to be oversized. The first thing they see when they enter is a 19th century Secretary desk with a 1930's electric mantel clock (with Westminster chimes turned on) sitting on it just below an aluminum platter with the symbols of the Zodiac that hangs on the far wall. The mantel clock was purchased by my grandparents the year my mother was born, 1934. Every quarter hour, the clock chimes, just like it did 90+ years ago. The Secretary desk goes back at least as far as my great-grandparents, perhaps great-great. Also in the foyer is a china cabinet that belonged to my wife's great-grandmother. My grandmother's china cabinet (1930s) sits in the formal dining room with a mahogany veneered dining room table with brass clawed feet that my mother purchased from an estate sale in 1970. The rest of the house is filled with such things, some rescued from basements, refurbished and repurposed, others things that I remember my mother picking up along the way at an auction or estate sale. Tiffany lamps, barrel tables, a Windsor chair, a work bench.
Most of the things we own that are not old are nonetheless unique. Most of our newer furniture is Amish made, designed by us on paper and made by a craftsman without the benefit of CAD drawings or automation. The dovetail joints and dowels used to hold them together, all hand done, are obvious. Even these have memory because of how they were acquired, a design, a conversation, a handshake agreement and a cash settlement on delivery.
The beauty and the difficulty of this way of decorating one's home is that these things were not all designed to be together in the same space, you have to have a vision of how these eclectic items will fit together to tell a story. That seems to be what is missing in a lot of our modern society, people want that warm vintage feel, but executing it takes effort that many people are either unable or unwilling to expend. When you can pull it off, the result is amazing.
Perfectly said. Our environment and the art we consume and create and decorate our lives with tells us the story of our lives and our ancestors lives as well!
All very well said, indeed. And there is something else to be said, I believe. It is wrong, I think, to say that beauty speaks to us, as if it were one 'thing' and we are another, separate and distinct. Better to say that beauty speaks through us in an intimate and ultimately mysterious embrace. So when I am painting well (all too seldomly, unfortunately), it is as if the painting paints itself, striving itself to be born. Of course there is some technique to it but that is simply the foundation of receptivity and competence that invites beauty to flow in and through. Perhaps there is a rough analogy with the wine vintage that you speak of, the fine wine of a locale emerging from the terroir's uncanny embrace of the vine that cannot be reduced fully to physics and chemistry. So when we gaze with an uncluttered mind upon a beautiful work of art or craft, we are being invited to merge our souls with the universal creative flow that is beauty. I really do think that it is a sacred duty to do all that is humanly possible to invite beauty's embrace and to act creatively as the only sensible loving response.
“The tendency to bare walls and decor purchased from a factory comes from a fear of imposing a real physical personality upon the world.” Where does this fear come from? What breeds such deadness of spirit?
Vintage not only means old or elegant, it also means full of memory and story. Our house is filled with such things. We built our current home last year, 2025, on a three acre piece of land in rural Pennsylvania. When designing the home itself, we took note of the existing older vintage homes in the area, providing pictures to the foreman on the worksite. "Make it look like this" we would tell him. He did, and when he was finished he gave us the best compliment we could have hoped for. "It looks like it belongs here" he said, "like it has been here for years."
We also designed it to contain our vintage things, the things that have memory and story. A visitor enters through double doors to the entry foyer, which we designed to be oversized. The first thing they see when they enter is a 19th century Secretary desk with a 1930's electric mantel clock (with Westminster chimes turned on) sitting on it just below an aluminum platter with the symbols of the Zodiac that hangs on the far wall. The mantel clock was purchased by my grandparents the year my mother was born, 1934. Every quarter hour, the clock chimes, just like it did 90+ years ago. The Secretary desk goes back at least as far as my great-grandparents, perhaps great-great. Also in the foyer is a china cabinet that belonged to my wife's great-grandmother. My grandmother's china cabinet (1930s) sits in the formal dining room with a mahogany veneered dining room table with brass clawed feet that my mother purchased from an estate sale in 1970. The rest of the house is filled with such things, some rescued from basements, refurbished and repurposed, others things that I remember my mother picking up along the way at an auction or estate sale. Tiffany lamps, barrel tables, a Windsor chair, a work bench.
Most of the things we own that are not old are nonetheless unique. Most of our newer furniture is Amish made, designed by us on paper and made by a craftsman without the benefit of CAD drawings or automation. The dovetail joints and dowels used to hold them together, all hand done, are obvious. Even these have memory because of how they were acquired, a design, a conversation, a handshake agreement and a cash settlement on delivery.
The beauty and the difficulty of this way of decorating one's home is that these things were not all designed to be together in the same space, you have to have a vision of how these eclectic items will fit together to tell a story. That seems to be what is missing in a lot of our modern society, people want that warm vintage feel, but executing it takes effort that many people are either unable or unwilling to expend. When you can pull it off, the result is amazing.
Perfectly said. Our environment and the art we consume and create and decorate our lives with tells us the story of our lives and our ancestors lives as well!
All very well said, indeed. And there is something else to be said, I believe. It is wrong, I think, to say that beauty speaks to us, as if it were one 'thing' and we are another, separate and distinct. Better to say that beauty speaks through us in an intimate and ultimately mysterious embrace. So when I am painting well (all too seldomly, unfortunately), it is as if the painting paints itself, striving itself to be born. Of course there is some technique to it but that is simply the foundation of receptivity and competence that invites beauty to flow in and through. Perhaps there is a rough analogy with the wine vintage that you speak of, the fine wine of a locale emerging from the terroir's uncanny embrace of the vine that cannot be reduced fully to physics and chemistry. So when we gaze with an uncluttered mind upon a beautiful work of art or craft, we are being invited to merge our souls with the universal creative flow that is beauty. I really do think that it is a sacred duty to do all that is humanly possible to invite beauty's embrace and to act creatively as the only sensible loving response.
“The tendency to bare walls and decor purchased from a factory comes from a fear of imposing a real physical personality upon the world.” Where does this fear come from? What breeds such deadness of spirit?