Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Living with Antiques”
Over the past ten years Wade Lege has rescued some of the disappearing landmarks of his native Louisiana, beginning with a group of Acadian cottages and culminating in the ongoing restoration of a Greek revival house originally from Kismet plantation. Wade Lege sold an early nineteenth-century armoire to pay for his architectural Moby Dick. With the proceeds, he got forty-five …
English inspiration, American creativity, and a bit of historical luck are joined in the author’s house and gardens Fig. 1. The neoclassical façade of the Gordon-Banks house in Newnan, Georgia. Several years ago English friends came for lunch at my house, now called the Gordon-Banks house, in Newnan, Georgia, some forty miles southwest of Atlanta. They walked down a …
Last winter, one of America’s great private collections slipped quietly from its urban home of nearly two decades in upper Manhattan to the splendor of a historic estate in Philadelphia. Preparing to move the peerless arts and crafts furniture, metalwork, glass, and ceramics, not to mention the sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, consumed the prior autumn months. Art handlers …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | You might say that this story begins with a canary-yellow jug. As sunny as a Southern California day, the stout Staffordshire pottery vessel printed with black verse occupies the bottom shelf of an eighteenth-century Massachusetts desk-and-bookcase. A small part of a sprawling collection, the jug is a vivid reminder of a man whose presence lingers …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | “Everything is timing,” says Richard Huber, recalling opportunities spotted and seized over a long career that took him and his wife, Roberta, around the world. On a gamble, they invested in vineyards in Chile, an icebreaker in Antarctica, even an emerald mine in Minas Gerais, Brazil. A twenty-five-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the Brazilian outback served …
By FRANCES PARKINSON KEYES; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, August 1980. I had not the slightest idea when I started, rather desperately, to look for a small apartment in New Orleans where I could spend a few days every month for a year or two, that I would end up with a main house containing twelve rooms; slave quarters containing six …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Our grandparents all came from Eastern Europe,” Nan Skier says, “and they came with no money or language skills. By their strength they made a good life and were successful, but they were pushcart peddlers when they got here. That’s one of the reasons the Ashcan school appeals to us. It’s our roots, …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | Called the last of the Georgians by the architect Robert A. M. Stern, Mott B. Schmidt dared to be unfashionable, stubbornly designing traditional houses for town and country long after they were in favor.* Schmidt’s houses in the American Georgian manner usually relied on a restrained combination of red brick, dark shutters, and …
Step into Sharon and Mack Cox’s house in Richmond, Kentucky, and your eye might land first on the large stone fireplace at the end of their open living room. On one side of the hearth is a ballot box thought to have belonged to Cassius Marcellus Clay, an early Southern abolitionist and a founder of the Republican party. Above the …
Fig. 1. Grand salon at Montgeoffroy. The chairs are all by the Paris menuisier Jean-Baptiste Gourdin (maître 1748), 1772–1775. Above the mantel hangs a portrait of the maréchal de Contades’s daughter Françoise-Marie-Gertrude de Contades (1727–1776), later comtesse de Plouër. At the right is one of three matching marble-topped console tables original to the room, and just visible in the foreground …