, lets us look closer at this cultural shift through home tours of 22 collectors across the United States and England. We spoke with him about that landscape today.focuses on younger antiques collectors, and while your collection isn’t featured, you’re part of this group. Where did your obsession with old furniture come from?
Years later, when I expressed an interest in antiques, my mother must have been horrified; they represented a sinister aspect of her past. But over time, my parents came to be wonderfully supportive of my interests, allowing me to haul the family around to historic houses and museums all over the South and helping me get to Maine at 17, where the life I lead today began. Collecting is ultimately, for me, about the love of objects.
At the same time, millennials were obsessing over color and pattern and old things and Sofia Coppola films. And this is when Lady Gaga appeared on the scene. I could see that the sort of ingredients that were contributing to this generation’s taste were not minimalism, or, at least, not solely minimalism. My peers weren’t high modernists. They didn’t think that it was wrong to have old things around.
Younger people today aren’t really making a choice between styles. They’re mixing everything — new, old, vintage, contemporary, antique. Millennial taste has embraced old, historic, complex things. Emily Adams Bode and Aaron Aujla, who are featured in the book, are figureheads of this. And Alex Tieghi-Walker, who will place a Shaker chair in an interior with great intention and doesn’t overwhelm it, also represents this vibe.