Mary Randolph Carter visits friends and explores their collections in her new coffee table book, “Live With the Things You Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After.” (Photo by Carter Berg courtesy Rizzoli)
Mary Randolph Carter has spent a lifetime writing about her passion for collecting vintage objects and how to live with them. In April, the native Richmonder turned New Yorker dropped by Creme de la Creme in Carytown to introduce her 10th tome on the subject, “Live With the Things You Love ... and You’ll Live Happily Ever After.”
Carter was working on ideas for her second book, she says, when she had her “junker’s conversion,” the day she pulled her pickup into a little rummage-thrift shop near her country house that was open only one day a week. “I realized beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I believe that the value comes from within,” she continues. “You create the value, you fall in love with something and you create the provenance. It’s all about the worth of the worthless in other people’s eyes. It’s also the thrill of the hunt. ... People have said, ‘Which do you prefer? Is it searching, finding the stuff or getting the stuff?’ Certainly, the search and the hunt is really fun because you just never know what you’ll find,” Carter says with a laugh.
“That’s sort of the mantra — my mantra and the mantra of this book is ‘Live with the things that you love,’ and by that I mean things that have a story that are connected to a person, to an experience,” she says.
Image courtesy Rizzoli
The book invites us into Carter’s private world — beginning in her New York apartment and ending with a visit to her country house — where she shares stories about the paintings, furniture and other objects she’s collected that continually make her smile and conjure happy memories for her family.
On the pages between, she visits old friends in their homes who share their thoughts on the items that reflect their personal style, give them joy and make their living spaces distinctive. “I try to be open to all kinds of style, but I think even in the more minimal houses, there’s always something there that connects them.”
Author Mary Emmerling is an old friend whose new home in the Hamptons reflects her love for all things Americana: blue-and-white spongeware, vintage walking sticks, primitive painted cupboards, American flags, and Native American turquoise and silver jewelry collections — things she’s moved with her from place to place.
Friends since her early days as an editor at Mademoiselle magazine, Carter asked Bethann Hardison, the legendary advocate for Black fashion models, to share her story. “Her mantra was, ‘The lighter the load, the freer the journey,’ Carter says. Today, everything in Hardison’s collection “has a story that, in its own way, tells hers.”
Joan Osofsky, the founder of Hammerton Barn lifestyle store in Dutchess County, New York, has moved five times since the 1970s. This led Carter to ask her how she decides what to keep. Osofsky’s advice is to choose items with the “common ingredient of soulfulness” that give meaning, memory and personality to your home.
