An Antique-Led Reference
Designers, rooms and objects shaped by antiques, provenance and restraint.
The Idea
Vecchio Lusso is a reference for antique-led interiors: rooms built around period furniture, inherited pieces, the decorative arts, patina and provenance.
The point is not nostalgia but depth. Old objects carry scale, material honesty and the evidence of use that a newly bought room rarely has. The best interiors are gathered over time rather than installed at once.
Underneath the objects is a way of living: rooms made to be lived in rather than seen, furnished with what their owners actually love rather than what would impress a visitor. That is the line this reference is drawn along.
The site is selective by design. It is about designers and objects with a real relationship to antiques, not general luxury decoration, showroom traditionalism, resort classicism or branded lifestyle interiors.
What this includes. Designers whose work depends on antiques: period furniture, inherited pieces, the decorative arts, historically literate rooms.
What it leaves aside. General luxury decoration, showroom traditionalism, resort classicism, purely contemporary collectible design, and rooms where antiques appear only as accents. The reasoning is set out in The Standard.
Where to Begin
Vecchio Lusso helps private clients, family offices, architects and designers identify the people, objects and principles behind antique-led interiors: rooms gathered over time rather than installed at once. It is an editorial reference, not a directory of every luxury designer, and not a marketplace.
How to Use This Guide
This is a selective reference, not a directory: every name is here for work that depends on antiques, and the list is short on purpose. A reference that includes everyone tells the reader nothing. The omissions are what give the inclusions their weight. The reasoning behind each name is open, in The Standard.
The Edit, by City
i.
London remains the strongest chapter in the tradition: English country-house decoration, antique textiles, layered rooms, and the studied ease of interiors that do not look newly decorated.
Full London guide →Where English country-house decoration begins.
The house, founded in the 1930s, that turned faded grandeur into a discipline: needlework, soft colour, and antiques arranged so the decorator's hand disappears. Through John Fowler's partnership with Nancy Lancaster it shaped the English country-house look; many later decorators have worked in its shadow. Still a working decorating house.
The collector's decorator; antique textiles as a first language.
Robert Kime Ltd. continues the world of its late founder: antique textiles, old rugs, furniture and objects, rooms assembled with the ease of long ownership rather than display.
Antiques dealer, furniture-maker and decorator.
His interiors begin with the architecture of a room and are built up in genuine period pieces; he was, in his own telling, born into the antiques trade.
Half a century of understated, art-conscious decoration.
A studio founded in 1964, long associated with historic houses and serious collectors: architecturally literate interiors in which antiques sit beside modern work, never over-designed. It continues across London, Paris and New York.
Generous, collected country rooms.
The studio of Henriette von Stockhausen: English country-house interiors layered with antiques and a continental eye; comfortable grandeur rather than show.
Quiet, well-travelled classicism.
An architect-trained designer and former Colefax director whose restrained rooms set English structure against antiques gathered from further afield: understatement carried with confidence.
A dealer's eye, colour-confident and eclectic.
A designer with a dealer's instinct, who started in antiques at sixteen: characterful, colour-confident rooms in which strong period and vernacular pieces are mixed with ease.
London decoration with continental polish and an antiques-house inheritance.
The partnership behind Paolo Moschino Ltd. (formerly Nicholas Haslam Ltd.), with London showrooms selling antique and vintage pieces alongside their own collections: traditional rooms given a continental, twentieth-century inflection.
ii.
Where the antique is held to the standard of the museum and the salon at once: eighteenth-century rigour, worn with French ease.
Full Paris guide →The decorator the great collectors turn to.
One of the most admired living French decorators, known for rooms that move between periods with complete authority: fine antiques and important art set together with a lightness that hides the scholarship under it.
Scholarly French classicism.
A designer and connoisseur whose interiors have the precision of a curator's: period rooms assembled on deep knowledge of the decorative arts, for private collectors and institutions alike.
Historic French decoration at its most opulent and learned.
A decorator and collector whose name is tied to richly worked period interiors and the long restoration of his own Château du Champ de Bataille, included here for the seriousness of his eighteenth-century collecting.
iii.
Milan is represented here by one name, deliberately: Studio Peregalli carries the chapter by itself.
Historical atmosphere, made architectural.
Founded in Milan in the early 1990s by Roberto Peregalli and Laura Sartori Rimini, both trained under Renzo Mongiardino, the studio builds rooms from historical literacy, patina, craft and atmosphere: interiors that feel inherited rather than installed.
iv.
The American line of descent, where antiques meet a tailored, present-day comfort, much of it out of the Parish-Hadley lineage.
Full New York guide →Bunny Williams & Elizabeth Lawrence; the collected American room.
Founded by Bunny Williams in 1988 and renamed Williams Lawrence in 2023: one of the most influential American traditional lineages, in layered, comfortable rooms built on a long familiarity with antiques, gardens and collections assembled over time.
A scholar-decorator of American antiques.
Principal of Jayne Design Studio (founded 1990), trained at Winterthur and the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing: rooms in which American and European antiques are placed with scholarship and an easy, lived-in comfort.
Continental antiques, tailored for today.
A former Parish-Hadley partner whose firm has a stated expertise in continental European antiques: refined interiors in which period pieces anchor a quietly modern comfort.
Modern-traditional rooms with serious antique use.
A New York firm (founded 1984) of richly layered interiors in which antiques of varied periods sit alongside modern art and custom work, included as a modern-traditional practice with a real record of collecting, not as pure old-world decoration.
v.
A short list: where genuine antiquarian taste survives the resort climate.
Swedish antiquarian; Gustavian light and patina.
A Swedish designer and antiques dealer long associated with Anglo-Scandinavian interiors, with a Worth Avenue presence, included as an antiquarian-decorator whose genuine antiques carry a cool, restful calm.
Cross-listed from New York for Palm Beach work.
See the New York entry. Carried here for the firm's Palm Beach commissions.
vi.
A short list: where the antique survives among the modern.
Full Los Angeles guide →The antiquarian's antiquarian of the West Coast.
Opened R. Tarlow Antiques on Melrose in 1976 and grew into a defining force in classic California taste: an exacting eye behind a handpicked stock of antiques and a famously short list of private clients.
European antiques, Californian light.
A designer who sets European antiques and classical references against a relaxed American ease: high decoration without the stiffness.
French antiques and château restoration.
A designer associated with French eighteenth-century taste and the restoration of historic French properties: comfortable interiors built on period furniture.
Spare, exacting rooms for serious collections.
The Misczynskis' studio: restrained, architecturally disciplined interiors in which antiques and serious art are placed with great precision.
vii.
A single name closes the edit.
West Coast classicism, close to the antiques world.
Principal of San Francisco's Tucker & Marks: a polished classicism with a strong connection to the decorative-arts world. She has long chaired the San Francisco Fall Show, formerly the city's Fall Art & Antiques Show.
&c.
Old-world taste does not always keep a city address. A standing place for names whose work belongs in this edit but whose ground lies outside the chapters above, beginning in Antwerp.
Patina as a philosophy; the dealer the dealers visit.
From the Kanaal, a converted distillery near Antwerp, the Vervoordt house has spent more than half a century in art and antiques, and in the interiors that grew from them. Its creed is original condition over restoration: the trace of time left intact, antiques set in quiet dialogue with the contemporary. Now run with his sons, it remains, for many, the reference point for old-world taste.
What Comes Next
The edit is, almost to a name, a record of the established. It is fashionable to say the generation behind them has no patience for patina or provenance, no wish to learn how a period room is made. It is not true.
The Next Hand follows one emerging designer working seriously in this tradition: the single hand most plainly carrying it forward.
The Backbone
Every entry is held to one test, and the reasoning is open. The Standard sets out what qualifies as old-world luxury, what does not, why antiques matter, and how each name is chosen and checked.