Heirloom Rooms

When you picture the home you grew up in, what do you actually remember—the paint color, or the way you felt safe during a storm, the smell of waffles, the sound of a screen door? In Heirloom Rooms, Erin Napier argues that a home is not a showcase but a living heirloom—an object of daily use that absorbs stories, griefs, jokes, and first steps, then hands them forward. She contends that the rooms you inhabit are repositories of family identity. They are designed with intention, evolve with your seasons, and deserve to be documented in their imperfect, mid-laundry, cheerfully lived-in truth. To truly keep a home, you honor its humanity, rescue its memories, and shape it to love your people well.

Napier sets this thesis against the backdrop of a single yellow 1925 craftsman cottage in Laurel, Mississippi—first adored from the sidewalk, then entrusted by its gracious elder owner, Mrs. Mary Lynn. From there, the book moves room by room, stitching personal memoir to design practice and community stewardship (think Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, but with biscuits, back porches, and a tornado-scarred mullion). Each chapter shows how a space’s form and features become inseparable from what happens there: a swing Ben built that becomes a stage for adoption-day champagne in Dixie cups; a dining table legged with repurposed porch columns that supports birthdays, design sketches, and diaper changes; a bathroom made sacred by loss, healing, and Eggo waffles eaten in the tub during pregnancy.

From Architecture to Biography

Napier’s core claim is deceptively simple: rooms are designed by people for people—and like people, homes are redeemable. A neglected bath can be reborn with Carrara and brass; a generic kitchen can be remade in rift-sawn white oak and American-built appliances; a stiff front door can be swapped for an old soul with rafter tails that seem to hug you. But the deeper point is that these redesigns only matter insofar as they serve the life unfolding within them. She favors artifacts that mean something—her daddy’s painting of Champ the bird dog, an oil portrait of Tony Soprano and Pie-O-My smuggled into the dining room under the name of an “uncle,” the screen doors Ben built because she wanted to hear their creak-slam “song.” In Napier’s hands, style becomes a servant to biography, not the other way around (a gentle rebuttal to trend-chasing interiors on Instagram).

Rooms That Do the Real Work

Across eleven spaces—front porch, entry, living room, dining room, bedrooms, guest rooms, bathroom, office, kitchen, and back porch—Napier shows how rooms prove their worth by how they hold us. The living room becomes a crucible where friends fall asleep on sofas, blind dates seed marriages, tornadoes blast windows, and a single unpainted mahogany mullion remains as a deliberate scar of survival. The bedroom reveals two nightstand biographies—Erin’s orderly journals and prayer book vs. Ben’s pocketknives, coins, and a Bush Dairy bottle overflowing with change—before becoming a bassinet harbor, a place where fear of motherhood flips to faith in a single turn of the lamp. The office shifts from late-night hustle for her stationery company to a soft-play toy room once children arrive, mirroring the couple’s own vocational arc from entrepreneurial grind to HGTV’s Home Town.

Hospitality, Craft, and Stewardship

Hospitality is the book’s posture. The front porch is "Sunday best"—fried chicken, neighbors, and a swinging bed crafted from century-old heart pine; the back porch is pajamas and Popsicles, the tender stage for COVID-era painting sessions with toddler Helen and sun-warmed grief as their aged Great Pyrenees, Baker, fades. Craft undergirds everything: Ben mills a lost 1925 hammer’s echo into new window mullions; salvaged columns become a dining table; a rift-sawn oak kitchen honors a craftsman house with furniture-like cabinets and limestone-look quartz. And stewardship—a conviction that houses are human—animates Napier’s preservation ethic: keep what tells the truth, repair what’s broken, add what amplifies the original song. Her preface about photographing her grandmother’s house before it passed to strangers is a thesis in miniature: if you don’t record the rooms that raised you, the particulars slip the way eye color can in memory.

Why This Matters to You

If you’ve ever felt paralyzed by perfection, Napier offers liberation: document what’s personal, not perfect. Frame your family’s mismatched past like a gallery wall. Keep the old Dutch oven with blackened crevices because it tastes like your grandmother’s kitchen. Let a red unpainted strip on a window remind your kids that their house literally sheltered them. You’ll find ideas you can use immediately—screen doors for sound and airflow, porch swings that double as daybeds, gallery walls of ancestors behaving like their flirty 1940s selves; and you’ll find perspective you can live by: homes change with your seasons, and that’s a feature. In the end, Heirloom Rooms is a guide for turning your rooms into durable vessels for love—a manual for curating a life that looks like you, lasts like an heirloom, and welcomes like a porch.

Porches, Napier says, are architecture’s way of greeting you. The front porch is the hugger—a lower-ceilinged, shaded threshold that sells you on a house before you’ve crossed the door. For Erin, the yellow craftsman’s ninety-year-old grin—deep eaves with rafter tails like outstretched arms—first appeared as a crush from the sidewalk and then as a personal invitation when she spotted its owner, Mrs. Mary Lynn, sweeping. Years later, that same porch becomes the family’s lobby for love, adoption, neighborliness, and ritual.

Front Porch: Public Hospitality

On adoption day for her infant nephew, a courtroom anxiety turns to a surprise white-flag surrender; the family proceeds straight to Erin and Ben’s porch for fried chicken and champagne in Dixie cups by 11 a.m. It’s April in Mississippi—prime porch weather—and the swing Ben built from century-old heart pine, suspended on thick rope and topped with twin-sized cushions, becomes both dais and cradle. Later, their daughter Helen makes the porch her first playground. With a nanny named Mimi, a doorbell camera, and Dolly Parton humming, Mom and Dad on a moldy job site can tele-visit their six-month-old bouncing 178 times in the morning breeze. By age four, Helen climbs the swing ropes to shout theatrical send-offs: “The coast is clear! Make good choices!”

Neighborliness grows from porches. Pears from a tree planted by Mary Lynn’s late husband become Erin’s ladder-top August harvest—four five-gallon buckets yielding cakes with caramel icing and a first-time canning lesson made festive with Red Hots tucked into jars. She leaves three buckets on the porch with a cardboard sign—FREE TO A GOOD HOME!—and delivers cake to Mary Lynn’s new condo. On nearby streets, porches host public magic: Mallorie Rasberry’s is "ground zero" on Halloween as Laurel shuts down and thousands of kids stream by; in Wetumpka, Alabama, the Big Fish house’s porch retains its cinematic heaven-shimmer, with Shellie Whitfield rocking in chairs once used by Jessica Lange (a note on preservation restraint that designers like Thomas O’Brien also preach).

Back Porch: Private Sanctuary

If the front porch is Sunday best, the back porch is bathrobe real. Erin and Ben build it last—mahogany decking, X-rail painted cream, shallow steps for toddler legs—tied to the 2019 kitchen renovation and the new needs of a walking child. Then COVID comes. Their back porch becomes a daily stage: morning waffles and raspberries under a cherry umbrella; Caamp on the speaker forming an emotional time capsule; spreadsheets of nonnegotiable expenses made beside the scent of the dryer vent; Saturdays with a blue plastic pool and a toddler painting a four-foot canvas in diapers and rainboots. The porch holds tenderness and ache together—their elderly Great Pyrenees, Baker, adored and gently fading, then gone; months later, a new fluffy Baker arrives to keep two little girls safe.

Design Moves You Can Steal

Napier’s porch playbook is pragmatic: when funds are tight, start with humble pieces (cheap Adirondacks and a glider that looks like teak from the street); save for better (real teak dining furniture); and build what matters most (a nap-worthy swing bed scaled to a giant husband’s frame). Add topiaries in old jugs to flank the door and a lamp on a porch table to eat “al fresco by lamplight”—because light = welcome. And remember, porches are story engines. The screen door creak, the swing chain squeak, the way pine pollen disappears on a golden-olive painted floor—those are the sounds and sights your kids will name when they talk about home.

Your entry tells on you. Erin jokes that hers announces “more-is-more people who meant to be more elegant”—pink backpacks and shoe piles under pearl-earringed portraits of her grandmothers. But this first room also becomes a thesis wall for identity and inheritance: a tight salon hang of twenty black-and-white photos—flirty 1940s smiles, regionally famous legs in cutoffs, velvet-suit coon dogs—framed in dollar-store wood and arranged around an old church pew under the words her heart implies: This we do in remembrance of you.

Objects as Shortcuts to Story

Napier is fearless about stealing back meaning. She "borrows" her mother’s hammered copper umbrella stand (not returned), then layers it with hand-carved walking sticks and Ben’s cowboy hats “like hungry, skinny men on the range.” The French doors open to the porch—and to hose water that sneaks in despite best seals—so Ben crafts custom screen doors early in his woodworking life. Their creak-slam becomes the soundtrack to coming and going, the audible hinge between inside and out. Over the years, luggage by the door chronicles their becoming: mismatched ramshackle suitcases for a two-week California adventure, then matching leather and waxed canvas stepping off JFK’s carousel. Then tiny strawberry and unicorn hats on hooks appear; size 1 moccasins expand to size 5 Velcro sneakers; a toddler kisses them goodbye on a Persian-over-sisal rug before they head to job sites.

Color, Scale, and Architectural Respect

Erin paints the foyer the color of WWII fatigues—muted, grounded—while trimming the picture rails in cream to honor the craftsman bones (a move reminiscent of Gil Schafer’s “new old house” palette restraint). She turns stuffy sconces upside down in adjacent spaces, swaps glass lily shades for linen, and opts for lamp light over ceiling lights to keep the entry “alive by candlelight.” Small adjustments to what’s fixed, then abundant play with what can change.

A Place That Marks Time

The entry witnesses thresholds. Pre-kids, it’s the portal to late-night neighborhood miles and undistracted sleep. Post-kids, it’s the daily reunion flare: “Mama! Daddy! Are you back for real?” A purple leotard and tap shoes blur past to hug their knees. Erin sees her grandmother’s heart-shaped face and her mother’s legs in that small dancer—genealogy visible in a doorframe. She also fast-forwards: one day, that child will stack mismatched luggage by this door headed to college. The entry’s job is to hold all of that—muddy boots, delivery boxes, pearl-earringed ancestors, and tomorrow’s send-offs—without apology.

Napier wonders what living happened in those mid-century “formal parlors” with jacquard sofas and crystal candy dishes. In her house, the living room must be a Velveteen Rabbit—worn real by use. It begins as lemon-meringue proper under Mary Lynn, then Erin and Ben paint, add bookcases (stuffed with secondhand hardcovers and family photos she calls “Wayne Riding on Things”), and swap stiff sconces for linen-shaded warmth. They choose dim lamps over overheads to cultivate permanent evening—an invitation to linger.

A Room That Holds Friends and Milestones

Life piles in. Mallorie unknowingly pregnant naps through movie credits on the sofa; Erin and Ben tuck a quilt and let her sleep. A blind date takes root at the art museum gala—set up by their friend Suss for her now-husband Ben Cole—after tux-and-gown photos by the hearth, prom-style without the curfew. Musicians Chris and Morgane Stapleton and actors Rachel and Chris Sullivan talk until midnight with three baby monitors glowing on the coffee table. Seven childless years later, the room’s center of gravity shifts. They bring Helen home on a freezing January day and make introductions in whispers: “This is your house. This is your swing in the window.” For Valentine’s, Ben builds a coffee table—oak spooled legs mimicking her crib—and it becomes easel, puzzle hub, and toddler-height meal stage. Furniture turns into family tools.

Marking Joy and Weathering Storms

From Thanksgiving to New Year’s, the room transforms into a New England den—evergreen boughs, red sconce shades, and a nine-foot Fraser fir woven with upholstery webbing and glass figurines. Elvis serenades Christmas morning as a hand-built toy kitchen appears. Then, one week before Christmas, a tornado hits Laurel. Sirens wail; the family squeezes into the powder room under the stairs. The house groans like a ship and then falls quiet. They emerge to broken front windows; tree limbs and glass glitter on the Persian rug beside a tiny pink hair bow. Ben mills a new mahogany mullion to match 1925 profiles, then deliberately leaves it unpainted inside—a deep red scar over the sofa. The house is literally an agent of shelter, and the family chooses to remember.

Design That Doesn’t Flinch

Erin’s picks are equal parts pretty and proven. A manufactured factory-cart coffee table “good enough” for early days; a nineteenth-century butcher’s chopping block repurposed as an end table (wiped with Lysol and a prayer); budget slipcovered sofas that welcome muddy dog paws; and a sailor’s oil portrait always lit by a brass picture light. In other words, durability, story, and lamplight beat preciousness, trend, and glare. The room’s success is measured by how much it can absorb—guests, holidays, fear, and first smiles—and still feel like the safest seat in the house.

Erin’s dining room is both café and museum—a place for waffles and watercolor, diapers and design work. It starts formal under Mary Lynn, all polished walnut and Sunday lunch; with Dover White walls and a wingback upholstered in a blue-striped flour sack, it loosens its tie. The beating heart becomes a table Ben builds from her parents’ retired porch parts—an eight-foot top from deconstructed decking and stout legs from replaced front columns. It passes the Napier test when a six-foot-four man bounces on it and nothing wobbles.

Furniture as Biography

Ben is new to woodworking in 2011, so false drawer fronts give the illusion of storage; Erin smiles at the cleverness. Early American ladder-backs and rush seats—cheap flea finds—earn smug pride until toddlerhood makes them a tipping hazard. Then, the couple upgrades to sturdier chairs, proving a Napier constant: rooms must evolve with the bodies in them. The teak-and-glass china cabinet holds conversation starter art—like the oil portrait of Tony Soprano and Pie-O-My that an aunt mistakes for “Ben’s daddy and his horse.” Above the cabinet, Daddy’s painting of his bird dog, Champ, returns from cabin exile to glory. Flanking French doors: a WWII Red Cross poster and a tattered 13-star American flag found for two dollars—likely a pre–WWI replica—that makes mealtime feel Revolutionary-adjacent.

Holidays and Ordinary Time

After their 2012 renovation blitz, Easter becomes their two-day open house: Saturday for minister parents, Sunday for the Rasberry-Walters clan. Card tables spill onto the front porch; coconut cake gets sliced after cousin Kent (a Baptist music minister with feathered hair and a gold cross) reports telling off neighborhood drug dealers about their trash cans. It’s comic and human—exactly the vibe this table invites. Later, the high chair in the corner takes first sweet potatoes for Helen, then stands "on call" for Mae. Erin misses the last time she ever lifts a daughter from that seat—the kind of domestic goodbye you only recognize in hindsight.

Art You Can Talk About

Napier insists the dining room is where conversation is "lively and scattered," so the art should be too. Family scribbles in gilt frames sit beside TV icons masquerading as relatives; serious oil landscapes share light with Red Cross ephemera. The effect is wabi-sabi coherence—everything relates by relation rather than by genre (akin to Luke Edward Hall’s cheerfully autobiographical walls). It makes hosting easier: guests always have something to point to, laugh about, or ask a story from. That’s the bar for “good” art here—not pedigree, but talkability.

Erin divides their bedroom into two autobiographies: her orderly stacks (Streams in the Desert, two journals, a clip-on reading light, a lidded blue-and-white dish for earplugs) and Ben’s sprawling catchalls (pocketknives, a Bush Dairy bottle brimming with coins, aviators, a pencil knifed down to a nub, ticket stubs, a sliver of tiger maple waiting for a repair “someday”). The contrast is affectionate. It proves her bigger point: bedrooms store who you are when no one’s looking.

Design for Climate and Calm

In muggy Mississippi, they choose a queen metal bed (travel-proof), linen duvet, percale sheets, blackout roller shades, and canvas curtains sewn by Erin’s mom. Chinoiserie lamps satisfy an old maxim—“every beautiful room needs a moment of chinoiserie”—and an armoire Ben built in their loft dictates the rest. A cedar chest with a carved WWII soldier’s initials seems perfect, but mothball perfume proves undefeatable; it stays a visual, not functional, heirloom—an honest lesson that not everything old can be used as intended.

Fear, Faith, and the Lamp Switch

Turning off the ginger-jar lamps becomes Erin’s daily examen—what she did, who she was. At thirty, longing for a child scares her; the job of motherhood feels like a promotion she can’t yet deserve. Then, one May night in 2017, she flips the switch with relief: she’s pregnant. She’s not yet sure she’ll be good at it, but certainty isn’t the point—commitment is. Both babies spend early months in bassinets by the bed; Erin watches their breathing on monitors after lights out and tells herself, “For today, I was good enough.” (In contrast to the productivity gospel in some home design books, Napier’s bedroom ethic is grace-forward.)

Kids’ Rooms That Grow Up With Them

Upstairs, guest rooms morph into a mossy-green nursery, then into a ballerina-leaning big-girl room. The nursery is layered for sleep: blackout wood blinds hidden behind crewelwork floral panels, sconces for low light, antique botanicals latched behind plexi for safety, and a quartersawn white oak crib Ben builds with bobbin feet and a heart-pine rail salvaged from their own walls—childhood literally framed by the house’s bones. A hailstorm at 5 a.m. sends Erin sprinting to scoop Helen out of that crib; hundred-year-old windows hold. At three, Helen graduates to matched mahogany Reid Classics pencil-post twins, with vintage ballerina and trapeze prints above a pink-and-turquoise Turkish rug. They practice the move in stages—reading in the new bed, sleeping in the crib—until Helen declares she’s ready. Erin and Ben weep through the last verse of their lullaby “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” their tears hidden by the dark. Rooms mature; so do their occupants.

Two spaces reveal Napier’s philosophy of craft under pressure: the bathroom and kitchen. Both start serviceable and impersonal. Both become instruments tuned to the family’s key. And both demonstrate Erin’s rule of thumb: invest where heat, water, and time are the hardest on materials—and where rituals fix themselves to your heart.

Baths: From Remedy to Ritual

Erin’s love of baths begins in fifth grade with a Plumeria bubble bath and Blues Traveler’s “Hook” on the car radio. As a young wife, her loft’s claw-foot tub is where she reads away travel stress. For years, undiagnosed appendix trouble makes the tub the only midnight analgesic—refill after refill to stave off tears—until a 2014 surgery resets baths as comfort rather than triage. Pregnant with Helen and filming Home Town, Erin and Ben impulsively demo their 1925 bath to make it private to the primary bedroom and to add a half bath for guests. During framing, they find a hammer lost inside the wall since 1925; the builder’s granddaughter appears that afternoon with original house photos. The objects belong together; they’re shadow-boxed in the dining room. The finished bath is deep green with shoulder-height Carrara tile, bleached-pine dressers turned to vanities, brass-and-milk-glass lighting, a generous shower for a giant husband, and a freestanding tub under wavy glass. In late pregnancy, Ben brings two Eggo waffles with Blackburn’s cane syrup and grape juice to the tub—Helen, Erin jokes, is made of waffles. On January 3, Erin’s water breaks in that very tub, three weeks early. Days later, they bathe a red-faced screamer in a plastic cradle nested in the big tub—a meta-bath if ever there was one. By Mae’s turn, Helen swims like an eel in bathwater set to her exact “handle straight ahead” standard, and Mae, made of toasted strawberry Pop-Tarts, giggles as her sister kisses sudsy toes.

Kitchens: Frugal First, Forever Later

“I would renovate this kitchen first,” Mary Lynn said. With $8,000 and night hours, they do: keep base boxes, add new doors, install IKEA butcher block, scrape popcorn ceilings, hang mercury-glass pendants from pulleys to avoid rewiring, and slide in a Craigslist stainless fridge under a custom surround. Ben rescues a cast-iron sink his mom found at a yard sale in 1995; they snag subway tile for sixty cents a square foot before the craze. The camera loves it; so do they—until baby supplies swell, a secondhand stove gets moody, and a rain leak caves the ceiling above the sink. In 2019, they build their forever kitchen without changing the layout: rift-sawn white oak cabinets designed like furniture (upper drawers step out, bases step back), honed quartz with limestone feel, and American-made appliances from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Ohio. Ben turns a mahogany table leg by leg. For Mother’s Day, Erin gets French copper pots and nearly ruins one popping corn—lesson learned the hard way: copper is for liquids. These are rooms designed to take a beating—and keep feeding—the next generation.

The office begins as Mary Lynn’s closed-door den. For Erin, it becomes a boundary experiment: half work, half music. She hangs maps of their travels floor to ceiling in frames Ben builds from old windows, covers seating in white denim, and parks a hand-me-down piano beside her oak teacher’s desk. It’s a room for late-night hustle—Lucky Luxe wedding stationery designs, marketing ideas that demand to be typed before sleep, and a gratitude journal called Make Something Good Today that trains her toward daily abundance.

Becoming Family, Not Just Busy

The office is also a friendship crucible. Ben’s youngest brother, Jesse—once the twelve-year-old Erin met in 2005, now a man—becomes a frequent overnight. Perched on a love seat arm that turns into a three-hour sink into the cushions, they talk through majors, faith, generational differences, Denzel Washington fandom. Those talks repattern Erin’s “only child” sense of siblinghood. Then a Skype with a production company happens here; the office serves as a set for season one interviews. By season two, the room becomes staging ground for baby swing and stuffed bunnies. On the way to the hospital with surprise-early labor for Helen, Ben snaps Erin’s last pregnant photo in a wool turtleneck right here—fright in her eyes. For Mae’s turn at 5 a.m., the last belly photo in a blue polka-dot sundress shows peace; they’ve walked this path before. Between the two births, Lucky Luxe ends naturally, like graduating from youth to motherhood. Erin doesn’t grieve—it’s a good trade: late-night designs for morning blocks and dollhouse calls.

Design for Becoming Who You Are

Napier’s rule for bonus rooms is the rule for life: let the room be what the season asks. Early on, it has four seats and a glider, perfect for political campaign spreadsheets when Ben runs for city council. Later, it’s shelves of toys, doll strollers, and a crate of bunnies overflowing. Today, Erin doesn’t work here at all. The white denim stays playful; the piano’s finish bears a tiny water ring from Helen’s toy tea set—an accidental patina of exactly the kind this book protects. If you’re torn between “productive” and “present,” Napier’s office story gives you permission to trade a perfect background for a lived one. Your future self will thank you.

“They say the kitchen is the heart of the home,” Erin writes, “but I’d specify: the bosom.” It’s where you feed, are fed, and get pulled close. After the forever renovation, friends and family instinctively drift in as though magnetized—kids underfoot, adults skirting around each other between trash and sink, the staccato of sizzling skillets keeping time. The proof of belonging? Guests open every drawer without asking to find Pyrex, dish soap, and foil because they’ve set the table here a hundred times.

Rituals That Anchor a Family

Erin’s everyday list reads like a liturgy: Lily’s cranberry granola, her mother’s pecan pie, birthday spaghetti and meatballs. In the $8,000 kitchen, she learns the pace of home cooking; in the oak-and-quartz version, she finalizes practices that will outlast trends. Best friend Mallorie knows this kitchen the way Erin knows hers—where the kids’ cups live, where the knives go post-dishwasher. That mutual memory is the measure of real hospitality (think of Julia Turshen’s Small Victories—a belief that simple, repeated meals build culture).

Failures That Become Lore

There’s glamour in the copper pot story because it ends in not-ruin. But there are also small collapses that become family lore: the ceiling falling into the sink after days of rain; a calcium-choked faucet aiming water at your shirt; the oven that dozes off mid-bake. Those things tell you when it’s time to invest—and what really matters about the room (fixtures, plumbing, and reliable heat). They also gift you stories to tell your kids about “the year our kitchen tried to quit before we could fire it.”

Design Notes for a Bosom Kitchen

Napier’s specific design decisions are copyable: treat cabinets like furniture; honor original layout if it works; pick counters and finishes that feel like they could have been there in 1925 (limestone-look quartz is a smart stand-in); and keep your table close enough to pull a stool and peel apples while chatting. You’ll know you’ve nailed it when friends can cook beside you without needing directions—and when your kids store plastic mermaids in the pots during cleanup.

Beneath the room-by-room memoir runs a civic ethic: houses are human creations that reflect human longing, and keeping them is an act of stewardship. Erin’s grief over photographing her grandmother’s house before it passes to strangers animates her restoration work on HGTV’s Home Town and Takeover. She and Ben believe “brokenness is not permanent, anything can be redeemed”—and they prove it by preserving, not pastiching. That’s why the Big Fish house in Wetumpka keeps its iconic pure-white exterior (heaven, peace, a goal achieved) with just a yellow door nod to artist-owner Shellie; and why, in Laurel, tiny cottages like Rena Register’s receive true Americana palettes under pecan groves, not generic gray flips.

Community as an Extension of Home

Contributors amplify the thesis. Mallorie’s historic Laurel house—future home to imagined Father of the Bride–style yard receptions—hosts weekly Home Town watch parties with pizza on the porch and bathtub wrangling for the girls. Linda Carson’s kitchen nods to her French château years with antiqued cabinetry and dark beams. Emily Saxton’s mudroom is a “plop spot” that keeps chaos contained so the rest of the house stays calm (a strategy echoed by professional organizers but delivered here with mom-tested candor). On Halloween, entire Laurel streets close and porches glow into the night—proof that private rooms make public life possible.

Leave Room for Imperfection

Erin asked contributors to photograph rooms “the way they actually live in them.” That includes scared nephews leaving Lego Batmen on ostrich lamps in the guest room; dogs smudging bathroom mirrors; and grown sons still piling into parents’ dens to drive toy trains. Across these homes, reclaimed materials carry former lives forward: Louise Coster’s antiques and salvage, Mallorie’s WWII Navy ship beds built into her girls’ room, Rena’s original porch refrigerator still running, now a memory dispenser for nieces fishing out cold drinks. The message is practical and freeing (and aligns with the patina-loving philosophy of Axel Vervoordt): polish what matters, but don’t sand away the soul.

How to Start Your Own Heirloom Record

Napier ends with a survey you can use to document your rooms: why this house, favorite memories by space, object stories, three-word house description, and what you’d miss if you moved. Use it exactly as written. Then, every few years—or after each life chapter—update it with new photos and notes. That way, when your children inherit your rooms or a stranger paints over your history, the particulars will not be lost.