9 Designers Share Their Favorite Heirloom Pieces, Along With Their Best Styling Tips

They're delivering plenty of inspiration for incorporating heirlooms and antiques into your own home.

Southerners are known for their love of heirloom pieces, and many interior designers have flawlessly integrated these special antiques into their own homes. Here, nine pros weigh in to share their favorite heirlooms that they personally own and also offer styling tips for those struggling with how to introduce a more storied piece into a contemporary setting. And if you don’t own an heirloom piece, it isn’t too late to seek one out while secondhand shopping—designers love to take this approach, too!

A Blue Glass Chandelier

Courtnay Tartt Elias, the founder of Creative Tonic in Houston, Texas, says that her all-time favorite heirloom piece is a blue opaline glass chandelier that formerly hung over her grandmother’s formal dining table. Today, the piece shines in Elias’s more relaxed eat-in kitchen, where it hangs above an extra large glass dining table with a rattan base. “My home is far more contemporary than my grandmother’s—we don't have a formal dining room, per se—but I was determined to find space for this precious fixture,” she says. “I love the juxtaposition of the formal crystal and opaline glass antique with the more casual rattan table and chairs, as well as the high-low contrast of its formality with our original industrial stainless steel countertops,” the designer explains. “Mostly, I love that it reminds me of her every day— so much so that I decorated my kitchen and even painted my refrigerator around the piece!”

Elias urges others with heirloom pieces that may not match their existing home style to think creatively about how to style such items. “If you love the piece and the story behind it, there's always a way to make it a fixture in your home,” she says. “The ornate formality of my grandmother’s chandelier shouldn't work in my contemporary space, at first blush, but by starting with the treasure and decorating to honor it, it looks intentional.”

A Vintage Monogrammed Dish

On a skirted table in Lauren Deloach’s family room sits a footed compote dish that features a scrolled monogram; it originates from the Essex and Sussex Hotel in Spring Lake, New Jersey, where Deloach’s parents met working as a waitress and a doorman in the summer of 1967. On Deloach’s wedding day, an elderly couple who her parents had waited on presented this dish to her as a gift. “I have enjoyed incorporating it into vignettes in my home over the years and telling the story of how my parents, a New Englander and a Southerner who otherwise may not have met, fell in love,” shares the founder of Lauren Deloach Interiors in Atlanta, Georgia.

An Antique Bread Bowl

Colleen Waguespack also owns a dish that she considers to be quite special: an antique bread bowl, which was a wedding gift of her mother’s. “It’s a staple at our dining table,” says the designer, who is the owner and creative director of Fig & Dove in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “My great-great grandfather founded the eponymous Leidenheimer Baking company, known famously for New Orleans style French bread,” she adds. “Whether it’s nightly dinner with our boys or a dinner party, the tradition of breaking bread after grace goes hand in hand with the start of a meal in our home.”

An English Pine Table

Will Hunt Lewis, owner of antique and vintage shop Hunt & Bloom in Houston, Texas, owns a little, circa 1800s English pine table, that he says has been with him all of his life—his mother bought the piece at a Louisiana antique store, and it served as Lewis’s bedside table when he was a child. Later on, Lewis styled the table in his New York residence for 13 years and it’s now a fixture of his Houston living room. “I love to mix casual, primitive antique styles like this with more formal ornate pieces,” he shares, noting how he elevated the simple piece with sterling silver accessories, glass bottles, and more.

Lewis offers advice for those struggling to integrate an heirloom piece into their modern space. “I always suggest looking at what your current home might be lacking,” he says. “China cabinets and armoires lend a beautiful storage solution for spaces short on closets. A settee is a lovely option for booth seating in a breakfast nook and secretary desks work as a getting-ready area in the corner of a bedroom. While these heirloom pieces might seem too beautiful to touch or repurpose, don't be scared to give them a new, upcycled sense of life.” 

A Reupholstered Camelback Sofa

Shannon Eddings, the founder of Shannon Eddings Interiors in Austin, Texas, inherited a camelback sofa from her grandparents a few years back and has since repurposed it to reflect her personal style. “It was a piece I had always admired and loved in their home,” comments Eddings, who notes that her grandparents had the piece covered in a solid shade of a silk-blend blue damask. To blend the piece into her family’s home, Eddings recovered it with a Lark Fontaine yellow performance velvet. “It’s truly my favorite piece in our home because of the meaning behind it and the fact that we can hang onto it for a lifetime and continue to reinvent it through reupholstery,” she shares. “It anchors our sitting room and is my happy spot for drinking coffee and reading a book most days.”

Eddings adds that in addition to reupholstery, there are many other ways to make over an heirloom piece to give it a new lease on life. “Updating an old chest with a marble top or new hardware is also a wonderful way to make things feel fresh without completely redoing them,” she explains.

An Antique Bar Cabinet

When Whitney Sturge was little, she always admired her grandparents’ antique bar cabinet, which sat in their sunroom next to a game table. “I loved how the front ‘secret door’ (or what I thought was a secret door) would open with this beautiful mirrored back,” reflects the Charlotte, North Carolina, based founder of Whitney Sturge Interiors. “It used to have these cocktail stirrers with colored tops that hung on either side that I thought were beautiful!” Today, the cabinet sits in Sturge’s living room and houses her husband’s bourbon collection.

A Brass Samovar

From her mother-in-law, who had lived overseas for many years, Carla Aston inherited a brass samovar sourced in Iran. “I always admired this unusual item in her home; she had many unique things collected from all around the world,” reflects Aston, the founder of Carla Aston Designed in The Woodlands, Texas. “The warm brass and bulbous shape were always a stand out sitting at her fireplace,” adds Aston, noting that she keeps the piece beside her own fireplace now, too.

An Antique Desk Turned Bathroom Vanity

There is always time to add new special pieces to your home that can be passed down as time goes on. “While I was in the process of designing our new build home, I took time to source pieces that would be our family's new heirlooms, even if they were not our own from the start,” explains Jessica Williamson. She landed on an antique desk from Chartreuse & Co in Frederick, Maryland. “I just knew it would be the perfect piece for our powder room and would serve our family in a meaningful way,” says the founder of JTW Design in Richmond, Virginia.

An American Butternut Breakfast Cabinet

Jessica Stambaugh, the founder of Jessica Stambaugh Interiors in Nashville, Tennessee, also opted to purchase a piece that would become an heirloom of her own. In her twenties, while she and her mother visited the Brimfield Flea Market near where Stambaugh grew up, she sourced an antique American butternut breakfast cupboard with original glass doors. The piece has since moved to several of Stambaugh’s residences and currently lives in her Nashville kitchen. “I think that’s the beauty and challenge of any heirloom—it means something personal, and often an intergenerational meaning, so you must find a way to make it work, and shine,” Stambaugh says. “Having that cabinet in my Nashville home now reminds me of family, sharing a love of antiquing with my mother, and where I am from.”

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