The Heirloom House ― How Ebay and I Decorated and Furnished My Nantucket Home

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 summer house, 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.

Filled with photos and drawings, readers are invited to follow Lefevre’s Ebay searches and heirloom-look design 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.

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 forThe Nantucket Chronicle on the island’s old houses. Earlier in her career, she made documentary films, includingKing 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.