TRANSITIONS : New Digs and Old Furniture Can Be a Match--With Help

“Antique and Not So Tique” is the name of an antique shop out in the desert that I’ve often passed but never gone into. Still, the name always makes me smile. And it’s an apt description of my own furniture.

We have some antiques and we have some “not so tiques.” We even have a pair of downright contemporary lamps. This collage of old, looks-like-old, and brand new seemed to work in our former house, a 1926 Mediterranean Revival that had hardwood floors, coved ceilings, fancy eucalyptus woodwork, beveled glass, interior arches and Craftsman details like mullioned wood windows.

Then we bought a new house with a forever view and typical ‘90s California architecture: cathedral ceilings, big--aluminum-- windows and stark white walls.

Panic set in. Could I put our eclectic furniture in this contemporary house?

Not without help, I decided.

I got in touch with an interior designer. Elaine Hankin, based in Huntington Beach, has had experience at this sort of thing--taking furniture that looks at home in one setting and successfully transferring it to a very different one.

One of her clients had to move a houseful of Pennsylvania Dutch antiques into a very contemporary condo in the beach area. Hankin transformed the condo’s fireplace (its 20-foot facade was relieved only by a rectangular niche) into a dramatic focal point by adding a concrete mantle and using faux-painting to make the mantle look like wood and the wall and hearth look like marble. French limestone floors, elaborate draperies and stenciling completed the look.

“She’s happy there. You’d never believe this place was so contemporary,” Hankin said.

But homes that are contemporary on the outside and Victorian on the inside just aren’t me. I was looking, I told her, for a way to make my furniture blend into this new environment.

I was willing to get rid of some things: my “not so tique” reproduction Victorian armchairs for example. A few years ago we’d replaced the Victorian sofa that went with them with a more contemporary piece that had traditional lines. We jettisoned some Victorian lamps at the same time, opting for modern metal with Mission elements. We planned to move away from a strictly antique look and use our better antiques as accent pieces. So I was willing to ditch the chairs and replace them with something more modern.

“No. Keep the chairs, they’ll work just fine,” Hankin said after surveying both the old house and the new one.

I didn’t want to get rid of the antique Louis XVI-style sofa or the Victorian armchair with claw and ball feet. But were they worth the expense of recovering once again? If they were, should we use modern, textured neutrals to make them fit in with the house?

Recovering them got a definite yes; modern, textured neutrals got a definite no. Hankin looked like she might be slightly sick at the thought.

“No, no. These are lovely, delicate pieces and they cry out for damasks and brocades,” she said. They got them.

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Then there was the furniture that wouldn’t fit in the new house. Although the square footage in the two houses is roughly the same, the division of space is different. In the new house, more space is devoted to the kitchen and family room and less to the dining and living rooms. Our round dining room table, four chairs and the china hutch didn’t seem to fit on our carefully mapped out grid-paper model. Well, they would fit as long as the fourth person didn’t do anything rash--like pull out the chair and try to sit down.

We dismissed the idea of only dining with New Yorkers (renowned for eating while standing up) and the equally absurd idea of parting with the table--one of our antique “finds,” it has a quarter-sawed oak top and claw feet.

Hankin’s solution was to move it to the nook in the kitchen, where it fit beautifully and everyone could sit down. She recommended a smaller, rectangular glass top table for the dining room.

She also found the perfect spot for an antique cupboard we used as a TV cabinet in the extra bedroom at our old house. We couldn’t make it work in the extra bedroom at the new place, but we hated to give it up. Now the burl doors with that hand-rubbed wax patina open to reveal--ta da!--work supplies in my home office.

One of the first major (read expensive) decisions required of new home buyers is flooring. And flooring turned out to be a key element in blending our furniture and house styles.

At first, we picked out a ceramic tile that looked like stone and the ubiquitous light-colored carpeting you see in all the models to go with it. But we were used to real hardwood floors (the kind with a subfloor) and Oriental rugs. Hankin’s advice was to keep the Oriental rugs, put hardwood flooring down in the entry, kitchen and family rooms and then use a low-nap neutral carpeting for the living and dining rooms and top it with Oriental rugs. The tile, she said, was too cold-looking and too hard on the feet when it came to standing around the kitchen. The wood gave us a warmer look and complemented the furniture better.

Tile floors, she said, work better in bathrooms. But we didn’t do that. We used less costly vinyl sheet flooring in the bathrooms so we could put the savings toward the lots-more-expensive-than-tile wood flooring. Hankin helped us select a pattern that looks like rectangular pieces of tile studded with small diamond-shapes at each corner. It’s a pattern that could be either contemporary or old-fashioned, depending on your accessories and outlook.

She measured furniture and drew up floor plans with different variations of where we could put things. When we moved, almost everything went exactly where she said it would. Even the high-backed reproduction armchairs, which I thought would be too tall to place in front of the entertainment center, fit there quite well.

Hankin’s other suggestions to make the contemporary house fit its eclectic furnishings included putting up picture rail molding in the living and dining rooms to act as an eye-stopper on the 12-foot-plus tall walls (one short section of dining room wall is 18 feet from floor to ceiling).

“That way, your eye is not constantly traveling up to that high ceiling. High ceilings increase the visual space tremendously, but they eventually end up with cobwebs here and there,” Hankin said. They also seemed to make the small-scale antique furniture look even smaller.

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For window treatments, she recommended something light and airy, like lace curtains with window shades for sun control and privacy. Although swags and cascades would look good with the furniture, she said we should avoid anything too heavy and massive.

The view from the large dining room window should be the first thing people see when they enter the house, she said.

“You don’t want to cover it up with massive window treatments,” she said.

If you don’t have a view, as was the case with her client who had the contemporary condo and Pennsylvania Dutch antiques, elaborate draperies can do a lot to create a traditional look. Hankin’s client got under-draperies, swags and cascades. Her walls were sponge painted in three shades of green to add to the traditional feeling.

Our stark white walls could be repainted in a creamier tone, but Hankin said the contrast between the dark furniture and the white walls is good. The china hutch, for example, really stands out from the wall.

“It really knocks you out when you first see it. If you put it against a wall with a lot of molding, you wouldn’t have the same punch,” she said.

Lack of punch was one reason she didn’t like the idea of recovering the antique pieces in neutral colors.

“Sure, we could have done them in neutrals, but you wouldn’t have the pizazz. These types of pieces require certain types of fabric; there’s no getting around it. They are not the big, overstuffed sofas that look wonderful in neutrals. (With neutral coverings) they wouldn’t be what they are supposed to be. Now they are,” Hankin said.

Ideally, she said, these tract homes would be furnished in a traditional style. But the architecture is so nebulous, that anything goes from very contemporary to very traditional, she said.

“That’s one of the ways developers are able to present homes to people that can be used anyway you want,” Hankin said.

At one time, builders were producing distinctly Spanish-looking homes. But not everyone liked distinctly Spanish-looking furniture, she said, and so they either had to forget about the exterior in their interior decor, or they lived with something they really didn’t like that well but went with the exterior of the house.

Coordinating the exterior and interior of a house is preferable, but it’s not always possible, she said.

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In a perfect design world, one would bring some of the outside to the inside and continue the inside on the outside.

Plants for example, can be brought inside the house, and outdoor furniture can coordinate with interior furnishings, she said. Hint: The plastic chairs at Home Depot will generally not do the trick here.

We’re not even thinking about outdoor furniture yet. We’re still living with temporary window coverings and working on the picture rail molding, among other things. Although we’re not finished, I have proof that what we’ve done so far with Hankin’s advice has worked.

It came in the form of my sister-in-law, who saw the house before we moved in and returned the other weekend to see it again.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “when I first saw the house, I liked it, but I couldn’t see your furniture in here. I’m surprised; everything looks great,” she said.

And sisters-in-law never tell lies--at least not in this family.