Those family heirlooms may be the coolest things in your house.

Here’s how to love living with them.

You’ve heard it. “Brown is down.” Younger adults don’t want their parents’ hand-me-down furniture. They want new things from IKEA that they can throw away when they move. Or so the story goes. Who knows if it’s true?

What is true is that the auction market that depends on the popularity of that brown furniture has been down for years. Boomer and Gen X parents and grandparents are downsizing, and much of their furniture is ending up at auction because their kids don’t want it. The market for antique furniture has revived a little, but there’s still plenty of time to snatch up gorgeous pieces for far less than you would have paid for those pieces twenty years ago.

And if you make a home for antiques and vintage furniture that comes from your family, you may have something even more special.

Go online, and you can find any number of articles telling you how to combine modern with antiques or vintage furnishings. The articles generally advise you to find good quality items you love and make them the focal point of your room. Excellent advice.

I approach interior design from a slightly different angle. I focus first on why. Why would you want to live with your grandmother Mimi’s late 19th century saddle chair (or dresser or side table) that needs some TLC, when you could plunk down a few bucks for a brand new chair? What would that old chair bring to your life?

The answer lies in what we need to be mentally healthy and happy. Each of us needs to surround ourselves with a blend of stimulation and support. Not necessarily in equal parts, but both stimulation and support must be present in our environment. Too much stimulation without support, and we’re agitated and unsettled. Too much support without stimulation, and we’re bored. Over time, either imbalance can exhaust us and leave us depressed.

What does that have to do with Mimi’s chair? That chair offers a few things we need. First, it offers support in the form of connection to Mimi herself, if you remember her fondly, and maybe to Mimi’s parents—members of your family you probably never met. The chair might trigger memories of summers at your grandparents, drinking sweet tea and crabbing on the pier. It reminds us that we’re connected to a history. That we’re not anonymous. Or fungible: The chair reminds us that we have a unique place in the story of our family and our community—a permanent spot on the family tree. At a time when our habits isolate us more and more from in-person human connection and our culture delivers the insidious message that we’re products to be harvested for our data, reminders that our lives have unique significance are important to our well-being.

Second, that chair is not something you see everyday. It wouldn’t disappear into the landscape at the Pottery Barn showroom. That chair offers the stimulation of surprise, of incongruity. In fact, the weirder it is, the more it may delight you and sharpen your senses. Mimi’s saddle chair may be a collector’s item—It may be a Stomps Burhardt with a large carved Northwind face—or it may be a humbler hand carved piece. But it won’t bore you. It will keep you feeling alive and curious. Just the thing you need in your home.

Federal style antique sideboard.
Painting: Lighthouse Point by Erin Ashley

But how do we combine the old with the new?

You probably don’t want to live in an IKEA showroom. But you might not want to live in Mimi’s attic, either. To avoid feeling trapped in either space, we can use the rule of thumb called the 80-20 principle. That means that 80 percent of our furnishings should be contemporary, and 20 percent should be antique and/or vintage. That proportion makes sense, as a general guideline.

But there are other easy ways to keep your room looking fresh and alive, no matter what proportion of contemporary to antique or vintage furniture you might adopt. One way is to hang big, bold wall art over or near a large antique piece. You see an example in the photo above. The piece is by artist Erin Ashley. It draws focus but it doesn’t overwhelm the fine Federal style sideboard beneath it. As a result, we see two periods co-existing peaceably. This use of contemporary wall art as a counterpoint to another historical period can be applied to any room.

And don’t underestimate the sheer exuberant funkiness of these very old pieces themselves. Some antiques are as cool today as they were over a hundred years ago. I have a lamp that was made from a large black metal vase that my great grandparents brought back from China. It sits on a side table with turned legs that I inherited from my grandmother. Both pieces have spoken to me since I was a child. And they’re right at home next to the contemporary sectional sofa in my den. The reason the antique pieces work with the contemporary sofa is that the antiques hold their own as pieces of art. They have the confidence to make a statement of their own. That makes them classic, and therefore timeless.

We’ll talk more about blending the old with the new in future posts. But appreciating those brown pieces for their uniqueness and personal significance is a good place to start.

Antique vase from China converted to table lamp. Side table with turned legs, from my grandmother’s house