L'LOOKBACK: Interior Designer Athena Calderone Opens Up Her Archive

Athena Calderone seeks inspiration across the globe and in the past. The interior designer is drawn to the 1930s—both in her recent collaboration with Crate & Barrel, released this fall, and in her Tribeca home currently under renovation. “My design is almost like a visual autobiography of what I'm obsessed with right now,” she says. This November, Calderone will travel Italy to celebrate two milestones: her 50th birthday and 25th wedding anniversary.

Every time Calderone travels, she takes something home with her, perhaps a souvenir or an inspiring idea for her home or a client’s. “Travel has been such an important player in my evolution as a designer,” Calderone says. She likes to pick up something vintage while on the road, whether it’s a vase, a vessel, or a catch-all, or “just something that ends up being very much imbued with the energy of that time and place in your life, where you were in the world, but also where you were in your life,” she says. Calderone is sure to add more meaningful pieces to her archive on her upcoming trip to Italy.

In fact, it is a vase—a more recent purchase—that holds a special place in her archive. She bought it at a flea market she frequents in Paris. “A few years ago, I was buying beautiful vases and vessels that almost looked like they were trapped at the bottom of the sea and had lichen attached to them, that had this raw and rustic patina to them,” Calderone says. The vase she recently acquired, in contrast, is a mix of a gunmetal and a classic pewter with geometric patterns. “[It] speaks to this new direction in mixing materiality and using materials that have a bit more of a sheen and a refined elegance,” she says. In essence, the vase represents where Calderone has been, where she is now, and where she’s going, professionally and personally.