Keep Your Grandma’s Stuff: How To Use Heritage as a Design Element

In this solo episode, I'm going deep on one of the five physical elements of every Slow Style home — and arguably the most personal one: Heritage and Culture.

It's about heritage as authorship. Not just the objects you've inherited, but the idea that your personal history — however much of it you know, however complicated it is, however far back it goes — is a story you get to write, edit, and hand forward. Most people treat their heirlooms as decorating problems. I want to reframe them as creative resources.

In this episode, specific objects from my own home and the stories behind them, how to handle heritage when it's complicated, why the house itself has a history worth honoring, what to bring home from the world when you travel with intention, and the room in my house that proves you don't have to inherit heritage — you can make it.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Heritage as authorship: the reframe that changes how you use heirlooms

Most people treat inherited objects as decorating problems: where does this go, does it match, is it worth keeping? Heritage as authorship reframes the question entirely. Your personal history — however much of it you know, however complicated it is — is a creative resource. The objects that carry it are not problems to be solved. They're sentences in a story you're writing. Once you understand that you're the author — not just the recipient — you stop asking whether something fits and start asking what it means. That shift changes everything about how you use it.

You probably already have more than you think

Heritage objects aren't limited to formal heirlooms or silver candlesticks no one is allowed to touch. Anything that came to you with a story attached qualifies: a piece of furniture with history on it, something from someone you loved, an object from a place that mattered. The framed fishing lures in my staircase gallery were made by a friend of my grandfather's — they hung in his bedroom my whole childhood, and now they live on a wall with everything else connected to the ocean, because the lineage is there even if the category isn't obvious. Start by looking at what you already own with the question: what story does this carry?

When the object doesn't fit anywhere: build the setting, not the object

If you have something you love but can't find a place for, the instinct is to conclude it isn't working. The silver tea service that belonged to my mother-in-law's mother resisted every surface I tried it on — until I stopped trying to fit it in and built a home for it instead. A chair and two bookcases came out of a corner of the dining room; an antique hutch with glass doors came in. The tea service finally had a stage. The lesson: sometimes the object isn't the problem. The right setting for it doesn't exist yet.

How to use heritage when the history is complicated

The warm version of this topic leaves too much out. Personal history is often layered with difficulty — relationships that weren't easy, eras that weren't happy, people who were complicated. You are not obligated to display objects that carry pain, and you're not obligated to let them go either. What heritage as authorship gives you is the ability to separate the hard parts from the beauty of what remains — the objects, the places, the traditions — and decide, on your own terms, what role any of it plays in the home you're building now. That is its own kind of power, and it belongs to you.

The house itself has a heritage: how to use it

Heritage as a design element isn't limited to your family tree. Every home was built in a particular era with particular materials and proportions — a character that predates you. Even one or two gestures that acknowledge when a house was built can give it a sense of rootedness that a generic approach can't replicate. And if the home is a newer build with no historical era to reference, the location itself becomes the cue: what does the landscape look like outside the windows? What's the regional material tradition? What's the light like? A house in coastal Maine tells you something completely different than one in the New Mexico desert — and following those cues is its own form of honoring where you are.

How to travel with intention and bring home objects worth keeping

The difference between a souvenir you'll love for the rest of your life and one that ends up in a drawer after six months comes down to how intentional you are before you walk into a shop. Before traveling anywhere, research what the place made: what craft tradition is specific to that region, what artistic form grew there, what materials are native to the landscape. That's where the objects worth keeping are — not in the airport display case, but in a workshop, a market, a small gallery run by someone who actually grew up there. In Cambodia, a private workshop visit arranged through a local guide led to a lacquerware fish made by hand, each tiny piece of eggshell placed with deliberateness. That object holds the memory of the place in a way no photograph quite manages.

How cohesion works in a Slow Style home: the quiet thread

On a buffet in our dining room, a vignette holds objects from Cambodia, Vietnam, Charleston, and Santa Fe. A lacquerware fish. A scarf modeled after a pattern reclaimed by Cambodian citizens from the Khmer Rouge as an act of cultural resistance. A hand-woven sweetgrass basket from a family of Charleston women who have been passing down their weaving techniques for centuries. A vintage wine bottle from a Portuguese-American club. Three different continents, four different places — and every single object in the grouping is woven. I didn't plan it. I noticed it after the fact. That's how cohesion often works: not a palette applied from the outside, but a quiet thread your instincts were tracking all along.

You can create heritage from scratch

Heritage isn't only inherited. It can be made. My husband and I have no ancestral connection to Santa Fe, New Mexico — and we've built an entire room around our love for it. That room is becoming part of our family's story: our kids absorb it, associate it with childhood and home, and may someday carry forward a connection to a landscape their parents loved without fully knowing where it came from. Heritage as authorship means you decide what goes into the story — including the chapters that haven't been handed down yet. Love something enough. Share that love openly enough. Give it tangible form in your home. The next generation will do the rest.

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