I Don't Want the Materials in Your Home to Stay Perfect – The Things That Are Allowed to Age Are the Ones Worth Keeping

I have spent an unreasonable amount of my adult life in slab yards. Thousands of slabs, easily. Marble, limestone, travertine, soapstone, bluestone, flagstone – I have walked the aisles, run my hands over them, watched them being cut, rejected them, fallen in love with them, and occasionally designed an entire room around one particularly beautiful piece.

When you design homes with three kitchens, 10 bathrooms, a mudroom, a scullery, and fireplaces to consider, you start thinking about stone a lot. And after all those years, all those yards, and all those projects, I have realized something: the materials I trust most are the ones that don't promise to stay perfect.

Real materials change. Marble etches. Limestone wears. Unlacquered brass darkens where you touch it. Wood gets scratched. Linen softens. Plaster develops subtle variations that could never be replicated by something manufactured to look exactly the same forever. I don't see any of that as damage. I see evidence of life.

I think this is part of what I have always loved about old European homes, well, European anything really. You walk into a house that has been standing for hundreds of years and no one is apologizing for the worn stone floor or countertop with a stain. Quite the opposite. That's usually the thing everyone is photographing.

The threshold is slightly uneven from generations of people walking across it. The brass hardware has darkened where countless hands have opened the door. The marble has rings and marks and little imperfections that tell you people actually cooked there. There is a confidence in allowing beautiful materials to age. And increasingly, that is what I want for the homes we design. I'm not interested in creating a house that looks its best on installation day. I want to know what it will look like in 20 years. Fifty years. I want the materials we choose today to become part of the home's history rather than something the next owner immediately wants to replace.

Stone is probably the clearest example. I will almost always choose natural stone with movement, variation, and evidence that it came from the earth. Give me the veining. Give me the fossil. Give me the section that's slightly different from the slab beside it. Those are the things that make a material impossible to reproduce – and, to me, infinitely more beautiful.

The same thinking extends throughout our projects. I love Venetian plaster because it reacts to light differently throughout the day. I love unlacquered brass and polished nickel or bronze because the finish you install isn't the finish you'll have five years later. It's living with you. I love solid wood because a scratch can become part of its story rather than the end of it. I love linen because it is arguably more beautiful rumpled than perfectly pressed. None of these materials are trying particularly hard to be perfect. Maybe that's the point.

Sustainability is a huge pillar of our studio, and I think sometimes we make that conversation more complicated than it needs to be. One of the most sustainable things we can do is choose materials we won't want to tear out in 10 years. Materials that leave a sensible footprint. For me, that means looking backward as much as forward. What has already survived? We have centuries of evidence that marble can age beautifully. That solid wood can be repaired. That stone floors can withstand generations. That brass can be polished – or left completely alone. History has already tested these materials for us...

So when clients ask me whether they should worry about their marble etching or their hardware changing, my answer is usually some version of: let it. Let the kitchen tell me that you cook there. Let the floor tell me where everyone walks. Let the brass show me which cabinet you open every morning. I don't want to design homes people are afraid to live in. I want to create homes that become more beautiful because they were lived in. And after thousands of slabs, countless samples, and more material meetings than I could ever count, that's probably the simplest design advice I can give: Choose the things that are allowed to age. They're always the ones worth keeping.

Interior designer Molly Kidd is one of Homes & Gardens' Editors-At-Large for By Design, where she shares her thoughts on decor. See the rest of her articles here.

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