About & Editorial Policy
An editorial reference.
What this is, how designers are chosen, and how corrections and submissions work.
Vecchio Lusso is an editorial reference for antique-led interiors: the designers, objects and rooms in which period furniture, inherited pieces and the decorative arts do the structural work rather than the decorating.
It is written for the people who make these decisions with money on the line: private clients, designers, architects, family offices and the advisors who answer to them. The job of the site is to say who actually works this way, who only appears to, and how to tell the two apart.
How designers are selected
A designer is selected for a body of work in which old objects carry the room (period furniture, original surfaces, worn leather, good frames, old textiles), and not for fame, billings or press. The list is short on purpose. A reference that admits everyone tells the reader nothing.
Where a designer sits at the edge of the standard, the entry says so instead of smoothing it over. The reasoning behind every inclusion is set out in The Standard. Entries are written from current sources: the living and the working are described in the present, the dead and the dissolved in the past.
Editorial independence
Inclusion is editorial and unpaid. No designer pays to appear.
No designer pays to appear, and none is left out for declining to. There is no advertising in the edit and no paid placements. What is included, how it is categorised, and what is said about it are decided here, against the Standard and nothing else.
Designers named in the edit are welcome to display the Selected in The Edit mark on their own site, linking back to their entry. Like inclusion itself, it is offered, never sold.
The Editor
A. Harrow, Editor
This is about how to live, as lived through the rooms you live in.
Most people live to impress others. The house is assembled to be seen, to say something to a visitor about money, or taste, or having arrived. There is another way, quieter and far less common: to surround yourself with what you find beautiful, and to let that be enough. Not beauty aimed at anyone. Beauty kept for its own sake, in rooms that would look the same whether or not a single guest ever walked through them.
That is the line the site is drawn along, and it is a snobbish one. But the snobbery is not about money. A person of small means who keeps, in a plain room, only the few things they truly love has the thing entirely. A person of great fortune who buys whatever signals status, and swaps it as the signals change, has none of it, and all the receipts. Wealth is not the test. Sincerity is.
Where wealth comes in is this: if you can afford beauty, beauty becomes part of how a life is lived, and antiques are part of beauty, held as continuity rather than as trophies. A piece that has passed through several lives, and will pass through several more, sets you inside something longer than your own taste: a quality you belong to rather than perform. That is what the old families understood and the newly arrived so often miss. The point was never to impress the room. It was to be equal to the things in it, and to hand them on.
So this is a way of living before it is a way of decorating. The antiques matter because they are real, because they carry time, and because the people who live well among them are usually the ones who weren't trying to prove anything. The reproduction, the render, the piece bought to be photographed: these belong to the impulse to be seen, and the site has no use for them.
I am not ranking talent or anointing heirs. I am telling apart the people who mean it from the people who perform it, and I see no reason to pretend the distinction doesn't matter.
I write under a private name, and the choice is practical, not theatrical. The design world is small. Many of the people discussed here know one another, share clients, or move in the same rooms, and a signed edit too easily becomes a social exercise: praise expected, omission taken personally, caution mistaken for politeness.
The editor stays private so the work can stay useful: candid enough to draw distinctions, careful enough to correct mistakes, and independent enough not to turn a place in the edit into a favour. Entries are based on public sources: firm materials, books, the serious design press, auction and decorative-arts references, museum records, and corrections from the field. This is not a ranking of friends, clients or famous names. It is an account of who actually has the eye for antique-led interiors, and why.
Corrections & submissions
This is a living reference. Designers and their representatives are welcome to write, usually to say one of four things:
- You have described our firm incorrectly. We will correct it or take it down.
- A fact is out of date: a name, a status, a principal. We revise as the record moves.
- You have antique-led work we should consider. We will read it against the Standard.
- Do not use a particular image, or list us at all. We will honour the request.
Correcting a fact does not buy a place in the edit, or a gentler entry. Inclusion, categorisation and commentary stay independent of any correction.
Designer entries last reviewed: June 2026. Object photographs are drawn from the open-access collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0, public domain).
Contact
For corrections, submissions or editorial inquiries: