Photography: Richard Waite
A house furnished entirely from one era often looks like a museum exhibit or a showroom. A house that mixes periods without discipline looks chaotic. The skill that separates genuinely successful eclectic interiors from both of these failures is among the hardest to teach and among the most valuable a designer can offer, whether to a client with inherited furniture, an heirloom they refuse to part with, or simply a wish to avoid a home that looks decorated rather than lived in.
The most common mistake is treating period mixing as a matter of taste, when it is more a matter of structure. A Georgian chair and a contemporary sofa can sit in the same room successfully, but only if something else in the room, whether material or colour, connects them. Without that connecting thread, the two pieces simply compete, each asserting a different period with no resolution between them.
The most successful approach I have found treats one era as the room's foundation and every other era as a deliberate exception within it. A contemporary room with one significant antique piece reads as curated. The antique becomes a focal point precisely because of its contrast. The same antique, surrounded by several other antiques from different periods and several contemporary pieces with no clear hierarchy, simply reads as cluttered, regardless of how beautiful any individual piece might be.
Material continuity matters more than period accuracy. A nineteenth-century chair reupholstered in a contemporary fabric, in a colour drawn from elsewhere in the room, integrates more successfully than the same chair left in its original, unrelated upholstery. The bones of the piece carry its history. The surface can carry the room's present.
This is, in the end, a question of editing rather than collecting. The client with a houseful of inherited furniture rarely needs to choose between keeping everything and keeping nothing. They need a small number of pieces given real prominence, and the discipline to let the rest go, so the pieces that remain can actually be seen.
Daniel Kostiuc Interior Design is a luxury interior design studio based in Brisbane, offering residential interior design and interior decoration across Queensland, Australia and internationally. Services include new builds, renovations and complete furnishing projects, with space planning, custom joinery, bespoke furniture, furniture selection, lighting, art and accessories for high-end homes.