Vintage Home Furniture

Mixing old furniture in a new modern house?

We are building a new house and have some old-style timber furniture that I love and would like to get more, but at the same time I want to keep the house looking modern (it has modern kitchen, bathrooms etc). Does anyone have any advice on mixing the two without looking odd?

Public Comments

1. Could you devote this furniture to one room and decorate the room around it? Maybe the family room?
2. I have antique furniture in every room along with the modern, but I do agree with the other answer to keep it to one room. I would not be afraid to put say just a sofa in the den or a chair in your boy's room, a table in the hall with a straight chair or two. You can work it out. I would use red somewhere in the accessories because it always looks good with that type of furniture, even hunter green.
3. I have a modern house and the right mixture of old and new is very impressive. My kitchen alone has old farm tools. I have several pieces of furniture that date back to the 1800's that looks great mixed with modern furniture. Use your eye and place things in a room and move them around. Your going to be in that home for more than a week. Place stuff till you get it placed where it fits. I've been in my house for 9 years and the wife still isn't completely settled. Old furniture makes a home warmer....
4. mixing old and new is really a great way to create interest and dynamic tension in interior design. Antiques really show off their best attributes when placed in the "clean slate" of modern lines and colors. My friend has a huge dining table made of glass that rests on 2 huge chrome hands.Around the table she has 8 mahogany antique armchairs in the Italian rococco style, elaborately carved, but reupholstered in silver satin, which ties it to the sleek lines and chrome of the table. i think this is the key: to find a successful way of "marrying" the pieces that shows them both off to their best. Another example i saw in a house i worked on, was a lounge done all in white, very spare and monochromatic. the fireplace was a simple rectangle in the wall with plain black granite around its perimeter. but over the fire there was a huge victorian painting of a girl on a chair with a dog. The frame was ornately carved, but was painted plain white to tie it to the room. and on the all-white streamlined sofa there were a few cushions upholstered in a heavy Victorian pattern using similar colors from the painting. ( I understood from the owners that the painting was a very pricey antique, and they were determined to show it off,even tho their taste was very modern and minimalist). You could tie in the timber furniture by incorporating timbered beams into the ceilings???and by using modern sleek chairs around a timbered table???
5. If you love it use it!! In every room. I have traditional furnishings in my home but I dont hesitate to add a piece or two that I have inherited. It adds the unexpected and makes for excitement in the room opposed to everything matching. Now that is BORING.