Olde Good Things has been mentioned in a recent pictorial feature in Design NJ, New Jersey’s Home & Design Magazine. This pictorial featured the incredibly beautiful designs of Linda Maley and Lisa Keyser, sisters and owners of Whitepop Design. Whitepop Design has the distinction of being featured in several NJ design magazines, showcases, and having the opportunity to design homes for people all over the East Coast.
The magazine pictorial featuring OGT was a great pat on back for the expertise of Whitepop Designs in integrating architectural salvage into existing interiors.
Here is our commentary on the pictorial featuring photo highlights of Olde Good Things’ salvaged goods.
Vintage items bring a warmth and grandeur that can’t be paralleled by new renditions of old things. The most important aspect of antiquing is knowing how to collect the showpiece items and learning to bypass the items that lend a sense of untrendy grandma-ness to a space. Classic old pieces are worth the investment as they bring depth and crumble the common platitude of modern factory recreations of style. At Olde Good Things, you will find treasures like the old church railing that recalls the grandeur of the Gothic era. To truly repurpose something may involve giving it a previously inconceivable function. The use of the railing as a truss adds swooping lines to an entry for a great room making it something more than the sum of its parts.
Walk into the room and find salvaged stained glass windows that echo a distant past. The house dons a grace and elegance from the past that has been brought to life through its salvaged parts. For the full impact of a thoroughly made-over house, the antique wainscoting and solid wooden wall paneling mimics the lines from the Gothic railings and windows and fireplace. Coming together like the final crescendo in an orchestral piece of full-bodied sound, the full grace of antique French doors leads to a sense of awe and silence fitting of a quiet, old lounge vaguely bedecked with musty cigar smoke and conversations lulling on fire lit nights.
Entirely possessed with a seemingly impossible cozy grandeur, the home is a complete relic of the past brought to full life in a present day setting through the art of Olde Good Things’ style and unique sense of perfection. A stark contrast to any cluttered antique store, the style and elegance in this home resonate through each piece salvaged from locations around the world. Argentine charm comes together with pieces so reminiscent of an old church, they seem to vibrate with tunes of old hymns sung in a capella resonance and the final rattle of a distant subway station in New York comes through in the kitchen tiles perched auspiciously beneath an ornately carved wooden hood for the stove and beautiful wooden ceilings that bring the entire picture into focus.
Very much alive, the past comes to a complete and final harmony with the present in each room throughout the home. Each item is beautifully showcased to perfection. Rich with stories and beautiful lives of their own, the antique pieces dwell somewhere in the liminals between time leaving their audience to wonder at their splendor and giving a whole new life to the walls of the home. Few walls require an entire audience to marvel at them, but these with their hand painted Argentine windows and ornately carved wooden panels, are quite something else. Made by hands from another time, the pieces evoke a kind of passion and stillness within the heart of the beholder.
If walls could speak, these would have more to tell than any modern re-fabricated attempt at reproduction and would be well worth several afternoons of hot tea and conversation. As for the present caretakers of the items, they live a life surrounded by reminders of the past and beauty of eras gone by. Perhaps in harkening back, it becomes possible to also look forward and imagine hallowed silences and moments of importance passing again before these very walls before they continue their journey and become part of new stories.
The photos in this post were taken from Design NJ, New Jersey’s Home & Design Magazine, February/March 2013 edition. Thank you!