Antique or Previously Owned

I have come to realize that given a choice, I will always select furniture ( for my personal use) that has belonged to other people .Some refer these pieces as vintage, or used, some call them antique… 125 years old?

I have only to look around  my own house to see just how many pieces of furniture I own that were previously owned and how few have been purchased off the rack with no story behind them. So is it the chair or the story, the person the mystery,  I don’t know? I also would most likely never buy a new house: it just wouldn’t occur to me to even look at a new house seriously. And yet one of my oldest and wisest friends wouldn’t buy a previously owned house if she could keep from it. So there is something for every one. As an old woman I knew one summer told me “ if everyone wanted the same thing there wouldn’t be enough to go around”. See I’ve told you all the good stuff I know I have learned from women!

Any way I have this collection of furniture in my house that I love and most of the great pieces were previously owned by someone else. Even the cocktail set was made to look like Mrs. Riggins.  Hell maybe I really don’t have an original thought in my head…Yea, I do.

 I have a special place for chairs. Rosemary once told me I wanted the chairs of every one I knew just so I could tell a story about them:  I have Mrs. Joy’s sock arm club chair with cabriole legs. After Mrs. Joy died, I got the chair and had it recovered in Leopard a couple years ago. I covered it in grey flannel for her. Then redid it in white on white patterned chintz. When I first saw it in about 1980 it was pink silk with a cabbage rose slipcover, Mrs. Joy was wonderful a tiny woman with a Minnie Mouse Voice, she liked to talk and I liked to listen she wore grey,taupe, and black, I never saw her in any thing else. I did her house in grey, taupe, and black. She wore a big black diamond on a wide platinum band with gold bands on either side. Her hair was grey and cut like Anna Wintour, long before anyone really knew who Anna was. She had her mink coat dyed to match her hair, and drank diet coke thru a black straw… She taught me to use monogrammed fingertip towels as every day napkins. I still buy them by the dozen although they are harder to find in the USA these days. This works really well; NO iron luxury…Mrs. Joy was just that…..