A charmed life

WILLIAM NATHANIEL BANKS Furniture & Decorative Arts, Living with Antiques

English inspiration, American creativity, and a bit of historical luck are joined in the author’s house and gardens 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 wide hallway onto a porch that overlooks a terrace and what the English …

The allure of Leeds House: An unparalleled private collection finds its ideal home in Philadelphia

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Living with Antiques

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 …

Living with Thomas Jayne

JANE LEAR Living with Antiques

The most surprising interior in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum. The sheer density of paintings, sculpture, furniture, architectural fragments and models, Greco-Roman marbles, and much more appears largely as it did when the renowned early nineteenth-century architect lived there, arranging and rearranging his art, artifacts, and antiquities. What elevates the profusion from an eccentric jumble to a splendid, startlingly …

South America’s epic past unfolds in a New York City town house

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Living with Antiques

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 …

Living with antiques, Beauregard House, a New Orleans “raised cottage”

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

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 …

Living with antiques: Elective affinities- the Ashcan school in Birmingham, Alabama

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

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, …

Living with antiques: No velvet ropes–a collection in New Jersey

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts, Living with Antiques

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 …

At home with Christopher Dresser

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

Photography by Paul Rocheleau| from The Magazine ANTIQUES, December 2009. | When you visit Janet and Lawrence Larose’s New York dining room, you are surrounded by hundreds of objects designed by Christopher Dresser. They are artfully arranged on a series of shelves: teacups perch on lily-pad saucers; frogs leap around a bowl; butterflies flit across cloisonné skies; and cranes are buffeted …