Inherit the Whim : Designing a Fresh Context for Treasured Family Heirlooms

When interior designer Mary McDonald moved into her Georgian-style house in Hancock Park six months ago, she brought with her a truckload of memories. Her mother had been an auction-goer who collected Staffordshire china, silver and Waterford crystal; her grandmother owned oil paintings and Victorian furniture. McDonald cherished these family heirlooms but also wanted a house that reflected her own, more modern style. “Many of these pieces I wouldn’t buy,” she says. “My friends urged me to get rid of them, but I could see how they could be salvaged.”

So instead of starting over, McDonald, 33, set about updating the house she shares with boyfriend John Berscsi and everything in it. For three months, she stripped the walls and woodwork of peeling paint and yellowed wallpaper. In the sun room, she replaced sliding glass windows with French doors, smoothed out the “cottage cheese” ceiling and warmed concrete floors with woven seagrass. To brighten the room, she painted it the color of whipped butter. Then she recaned and restained her grandmother’s sofa and chairs, and reupholstered the yellow velvet cushions in white canvas.

The wood-paneled den, once a garish pumpkin orange, was painted a distinguished gray-brown, providing a sedate backdrop for one of her mother’s cut-crystal vases and an oil painting of an early California artist who was a friend of her grandparents. McDonald gave the room’s hand-me-down Victorian piano bench a much-needed face lift, redoing it in gray and cream striped silk with silver studs. In the master bedroom, dreamy shades of cream and coffee transformed the walls and custom tufted headboard and sofa. The same colors turn up on McDonald’s pair of 1950s chairs, which were reupholstered and teamed with her grandmother’s crystal girandoles and her mother’s 1940s mirrored occasional table. Wool sisal in a natural shade replaced unsightly red carpeting.

The interiors of McDonald’s new home strike a happy balance. The rooms are less about being a slave to the past, she says, and more about “creating a style, fixing pieces up and putting them in a new light.” In fact, updating what she inherited from her mother and grandmother taught McDonald not only about personalizing space but also the source of her own aesthetic: “They had a real creative nature, so I guess my decision to become an interior designer was a matter of DNA.”