Is It a Principle or a Preference?

I've been standing in my living room looking at things.

It's a large L-shaped space, open plan, the kind of room that has accumulated rather than been decorated. The IKEA sofa is covered in antique linen. The aluminium dining chairs are reproduction US Navy issue, a classic design made to last decades aboard ships. The dining table is an antique Swedish postal sorting table, the kind of thing that once organised other people's letters and parcels and lives. The armchairs are vintage finds. The cabinets came from an Eastern European hospital, mid-twentieth century, medical-grade and built accordingly.

Almost nothing in here is new. And I hadn't quite clocked that until this week.

It started, as most things do, out of necessity.

When I first set up my own home I had no money, and the salvage yard, the junk shop, the Sunday car boot was where you went when you couldn't afford new. That's just what you did. But something happened in those early years that went well beyond economy. I started noticing what the old things had that the new things didn't.

This mattered because my working life at that point was entirely the new. I was a stylist for magazines. My job — literally — was to know what was fresh, what had just arrived, what the high street was offering that season. I was immersed in newness every single day. And I often found much of it soulless, and with the exception of certain high end pieces and hand made, most of it was factory-made, characterless, produced to a price point and designed to be replaced. 

The magazine world had a word for what I did in preparation for a shoot. Propping. You'd spend days going from shop to shop, borrowing items — everything from a vase to a sofa — returning it all afterwards, nothing kept. It was shopping without consequences, which sounds ideal. And in the high street stores and the contemporary showrooms it was fine. Efficient. You got what you needed.

But the antique shops were something else entirely. They were like sweetie shops. Every one of them a different world — full of texture and history and objects that had arrived there from somewhere completely specific. The pitted surface of an old glass mirror. The peeling paint on a French farmhouse table. An embroidered monogram on an antique linen sheet, worked by hand for someone’s trousseau, handed down through generations or perhaps found unused, lost and found in forgotten linen cupboard in some rambling chateau.The tactility of these things. The faded colours. The patina. The fact that they had been made with genuine skill and genuine care and — you could feel it — genuine time.

And here's what I noticed early and never stopped noticing: the antiques made the new things look better. That was the job — showcasing what was new, what to buy, what the high street was offering that season and making them look desirable, irresistible, necessary. People bought magazines then the way they follow social media accounts now. To find out what was worth having, endorsed by someone they trusted. Back then it was us — the magazine girls. And I learned very quickly that a beautiful new lamp on a bare shelf was one thing. The same lamp next to an antique, something worn and specific and loaded with history — that was another thing entirely. The old gave the new gravitas. More than that, it gave it soul. And you felt the difference immediately, even if you couldn't have explained it.

I also discovered something practical, you could often afford far better quality in an old item than the new market offered at any equivalent price- I don't mean priceless antiques, obviously, but the second hand, the vintage, the discarded.

There are three objects I bought in those early years that I still have.

A pair of antique plaster mouldings. They cost me nearly a month's wages and I bought them anyway, half terrified, completely certain. They sit on my mantelpiece now as they always have.

A small round engraved mirror. I put it on the wall and went on collecting mirrors until I had lost count.

And a chair. Post-war French, aluminium, made in the late 1940s or early 1950s by one of the many aircraft manufacturers who found themselves without a war to serve and turned their skills and their materials toward furniture instead. A chair that is the direct descendant of wartime industry. 

Three objects, three completely different stories. Each one brought something into my everyday life that no new thing had managed to: the sense of time having passed through an object and left its mark. The sense that a human being had made this, had cared how it turned out, had expected it to last.

I never want to live in a museum. It’s why I'd never fill a home with only one era, however beautiful. A Charles Eames chair sits in my house alongside things from the 18th century, the 1870s, the mid-20th century. None of them feel old in that room. They feel alive, because they're in conversation — with each other, with the reproduction Navy chairs, with the IKEA sofa underneath its antique linen. The layering is what gives it the edge. Pull one era out and the whole thing shifts. It starts to feel laboured, a pastiche, like painting by numbers.

Is choosing reclaimed and recycled a style decision or a way of life? I think it's a dishonest question. Because the honest answer is — for most of us, it started as one and became the other. And there is nothing wrong with that journey. The aesthetic led me somewhere deeper. I began buying old things because they were affordable and beautiful. I kept buying them because I came to believe that the responsible and elegant thing — given what already exists in the world, made with such love and such skill — is to rehouse it, care for it, and live with it well.

Atlanta x