The Heirloom House: How eBay and I Decorated and Furnished My Nantucket Home

(Hardback)

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Inspiration for Every Home Decorator with a Passion for the Past

The Heirloom House is a humorous personal account of two interlocking obsessions: eBay and the quest to create a vacation house that looks and feels like a family heirloom.

Beginning with recollections of her childhood summers in Nantucket, author Sherry Lefevre narrates the development of her personal aesthetic: wanting everything people with old inherited houses have. When she receives a bequest that allows her to purchase her own ramshackle summerhouse, she clicks on eBay and emerges two months later with a house fully furnished with other peoples ancestral treasures, from toile curtains to taxidermy, at a more-than-affordable price.

Filled with photos and drawings, The Heirloom House invites readers to follow Lefevres eBay searches and imitate her heirloom-hunting strategies. Antique treasures are classified and eBay search words are suggested to assist the readers own treasure hunting. Anecdotes, both informative and entertaining, enliven descriptions of the antique objects acquired, and while the whole endeavor is relayed with humor, the underlying message is a serious one: with enough love, anyone can have an ancestral homean heirloom house.

Reviews

Engaging . . . by turns nostalgic memoir, archival local history, practical renovation manual, traditional home furnishings primer, and how-to guide for navigating eBay. . . . Her ideas about properly decorating a seaside house are every bit as definite as [Mario] Prazs precepts for palazzi. The New York Review of Books

"Snappy writing with appealing and accessible information." Leslie Linsley, author of Nantucket Cottages and Gardens and Nantucket Island Living

"The story of a woman who has found a way to live her dreams. This book is a testament to nostalgia and the picturesque." Sarah A. Chrisman, author of Victorian Secrets and This Victorian Life
Engaging . . . by turns nostalgic memoir, archival local history, practical renovation manual, traditional home furnishings primer, and how-to guide for navigating eBay. . . . Her ideas about properly decorating a seaside house are every bit as definite as [Mario] Prazs precepts for palazzi. The New York Review of Books

"Snappy writing with appealing and accessible information." Leslie Linsley, author of Nantucket Cottages and Gardens and Nantucket Island Living

"The story of a woman who has found a way to live her dreams. This book is a testament to nostalgia and the picturesque." Sarah A. Chrisman, author of Victorian Secrets and This Victorian Life

Author Bio

Sherry Lefevre teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she has taught film writing, creative nonfiction, and storytelling. She has written numerous articles for The Nantucket Chronicle on the islands old houses. Earlier in her career, she made documentary films, including King of The Junkmen, which received first prize at The Philadelphia Film Festival. It told the story of junk salvagers and presaged her love of all things recycled. Sherry splits her time between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the island of Nantucket.