#LKRB principles of design

#LKRB principle of design: love before you buy

Posted by Mir Martz on

The most important reason to purchase inexpensive furniture as a young adult isn’t to save money, but rather to make sure that when you do buy high quality furniture, you love what you buy. Shopping for antiques and custom-made decor takes patience and persistence. If you don’t hire an interior designer to do your shopping before moving into a new home, you’ll need placeholder furniture to use while you take your time to find the pieces you love.

I have a double-sized living room with two sitting areas. When I moved into this home, I initially had a mid-century modern coffee table in one sitting area and an IKEA Malmsta coffee table in the second sitting area.

Double-sized living room with mid-century modern coffee table and IKEA Malmsta | Photo by Mir Martz
Double-sized living room with mid-century modern coffee table and IKEA Malmsta | Photo by Mir Martz

Finding the right size and shape antique

Incorporating antiques into a contemporary home requires a little bit of imagination. It took me two years before I found another mid-century modern coffee table with the right size and a complementary aesthetic to replace the IKEA Malmsta coffee table that I was using as a placeholder.

The sitting area where the IKEA Malmsta coffee table was required a rectangular or oblong coffee table. I used the measurements of the placeholder coffee table to guide my shopping and limited the antique tables I looked at to rectangular coffee tables with similar dimensions.

Mixing and matching aesthetics

Antique furniture doesn’t always come in sets and in order to mix and match antiques, you’ll need to find antique pieces with similar aesthetic details. My original, circular coffee table has a lacquered brass base with cylindrical legs and a green-tinged glass top. I looked for similar materials (brass, glass, acrylic, etc.), focusing on mid-century modern, Art Deco and Hollywood Regency-era pieces.

The coffee table I purchased was not an exact match to the original. While the second coffee table has cylindrical legs and a green-tinged glass top, the legs are aluminum rather than lacquered brass and the glass is heavier. The gold tone at each end of the aluminum legs helps the table base mesh with the lacquered brass on the original table.

Double-sized living room with mixed and matched mid-century modern coffee tables in glass, lacquered brass, and aluminum | Photo by Mir Martz
Double-sized living room with mixed and matched mid-century modern coffee tables in glass, lacquered brass, and aluminum | Photo by Mir Martz

The resulting aesthetic of my living room was worth the wait, and could not have been accomplished if I had tried to buy all my furniture before moving in.

Learn more about antique styles that complement contemporary interiors here.