The Heirloom House

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 people’s 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 Lefevre’s eBay searches and imitate her heirloom-hunting strategies. Antique treasures are classified and eBay “search words” are suggested to assist the reader’s 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 home—an heirloom house.