Tip Number One: Skip Vintage Accessories

You can sink tons of dough into beautiful furniture, but period accent pieces, especially lamps and art, can make your place look a stage set or, worse, a junk shop. And they undermine the impact that a few well-selected pieces of vintage furniture should have.

Go for understated, contemporary accessories instead. They make the vintage stuff stand out as the treasures they really are.

I like to look at Neiman Marcus for inspiration. Love, love, love their lamps, and they always have nice sales. Just make sure that your contemporary stuff is not too big for your antique stuff.

Tip Number Two: Don’t Mix Scale

I hate, hate, hate how oversized contemporary furniture can be! It seems like all the major houseware designers, from high-end to low, assume that everyone lives in a McMansion. I live in a small apartment with small furniture. Big furniture makes my vintage stuff look tiny and my place feel cramped. Plus it is hard to create a sense of harmony when you are surrounded by furniture that works on two different scales. Makes me realize how Goldie Locks must have felt in Papa Bear’s chair.

The best way to avoid the scale problem is to measure and chart on graph paper before you buy things. Eyeballing fails. You can look at a sofa or chandelier in a store and think that it will work with your antiques, but often the scale of the store will throw your perceptions off.

Tip Number Three: Edit

If you make a mistake and find yourself stuck with a piece that you don’t like, admit your error, remove the object from your home and move on. Reselling bad choices on eBay can be a great way to save up for the next purchase.

Tip Number Four: Be Mindful of the Changing Definition of “Functional”

Our bottoms are bigger, life requires more cables, wires and chords, we have more stuff, and the way we execute household tasks would be unrecognizable to furniture designers of the past.

Take my desk, for example. It is a cute writing desk, probably from the mid 1950’s, and it looks hot with my iMac. But it was designed to work with a stationary chair, not an office chair with wheels. So that's what I got.

Most contemporary office or desk chairs would not work with my diminutive desk. Love the desk, get a small, simple chair (not a big contemporary one).

Tip Number Five: Stick to Classical Pieces

Whatever the period you enjoy, stick with the more classic pieces from that time. Think of the Moody Blues and the Beatles. Both bands produced successful pop music starting in the mid 60’s, but one band sounds period and a little silly while the other, while still of its time, sounds like a classic. (Apologies to Moody Blues fans!)

My husband and I have a funky, atomic-style, teak end table/magazine rack that is too period. Then we have our teak credenza: it has simple lines and good proportions. Both the end tables and the credenza are from the same period, but one looks like a novelty piece and the other is a classic. The end table bugs me every single day. Time to edit!