FINDERS KEEPERS | MASTERS & MUSES | CABANA MAGAZINE
Mary Randolph Carter has managed to turn her passion for antiques and objects into a career, but without being obliged to pass on her finds. The celebrated author shares the incredible story of two objects: her greatest find and the piece she'll keep forever.
INTERVIEW BY SARA PIERDONÀ | MASTERS & MUSES | 7 MARCH 2025
Mary Randolph Carter's home in New York © Live with the Things you Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After, Rizzoli, 2025; All images © Carter Berg.
Mary Randolph Carter has managed to turn her passion for fine antiques into a career, but taking a more singular direction than an antique dealer or decorators, often torn in the dilemma of what to give to a client and what to keep for themselves.
Instead, Carter decided to write a series of - now highly successful - books on the curious art of 'finding things', the latest of which (Live With the Things You Love: And You'll Live Happily Ever After) has just been published. Like her previous titles, all of which feature wonderful and sometimes humorous pictures, this book has the intriguing characteristic of putting flashy 'knick-knacks' on the same level as rare and valuable pieces - because, after all, every object deserves to be recognised for its sentimental value.
Mary's Greatest Find © Live with the Things you Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After, Rizzoli, 2025; All images © Carter Berg.
My Greatest Find: A Portrait
"This is a challenging question to someone who has been hunting down abandoned treasures for decades! Actually, I think my greatest find found me!
Until I was ten, I lived with my parents and three younger sisters and brother on the first floor of a large brick house on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Next door lived a doctor, his wife and three sons. One of them was an artist named Bill who had a studio on the top floor. When I was six, he asked my parents if he could paint my portrait. I remember those sessions sitting in a little wooden chair wearing my favorite red dotted Swiss dress with a big white pointed collar.
To this day I don’t remember where my portrait was hung. Maybe it was hidden in a dark corner so my younger siblings wouldn’t wonder why they hadn’t been asked to sit for their portrait. After a tragic fire that took our lives upstairs, we left Richmond and moved into “River Barn,” our summer home on the Rappahannock River. I remember this time that my portrait hung in the living room of our cozier home.
Five years later, as fate would have it, another fire tore through our home and... everything we owned ended up in a pile of ashes, including that portrait of me. Fast forward to six years ago, living with my husband in the same Manhattan apartment we have lived in for five decades, I got a call from my younger sister saying she had received a surprising email from a woman who turned out to be the daughter of the artist, Bill, who had painted my childhood portrait. Her father had recently passed away and, during the clean out of his studio, she had come across a portrait of a little girl she thought might be one of us. She sent a screenshot of a little girl in a blue velvet dress.
Shockingly, it was me, but not in the dress I had posed in. There had been a formal family photograph taken before that dreadful fire on Monument Avenue and in it I was wearing that blue velvet dress. Had he copied it knowing that the other one was lost in the fire? Of course, I had to have it, and eventually his daughter drove from North Carolina and presented it to me in a beautiful carved frame.
How that ghost painting of that little girl found me, I will never know, but now she is home and hangs on the wall in our cluttered living room — the prized possession of all the I have hunted down and collected. My greatest find, and (although this is the answer to your second question) one I will keep forever and could not live without."
Mary's Keeper, an Adirondack chair © Live with the Things you Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After, Rizzoli, 2025; Images © Carter Berg.
The Piece I'll Keep Forever: An old Adirondack chair
"There are so many pieces I would wish to keep forever, but if pushed to name one it would be the old Adirondack chair that I excavated one summer holiday in the early ‘80s from a pile of stuff in a junk shop on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Adirondack chairs are an American classic. The original was created as an outdoor lounge chair around 1900 by Thomas Lee, a resident of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. He was looking to construct a chair to withstand the rugged terrain of the area and used a single plank for the seat and back. By 1938, open slats replaced the single plank and define the look of the modern Adirondack chair of today.
The one I discovered was multi-colored with the traces of at least six layers of paint. It reminded me of the artworks by American painter, Jasper Johns. Coincidentally, I learned from the owner of the old oceanfront hotel we stayed in that the artist himself had stayed in the same loft we returned to summer after summer. So, it seemed perfectly natural to name our chair, “The Jasper Johns Chair”.
When I decided I had to have that chair, the owner suggested how great it would look if the old paint was sanded down and a new coat of paint was slathered on. I was horrified! I loved the layers of faded colors and rescued it just as it was. At the end of the summer, we crammed it into the back of our station wagon and brought it to its new home in our apartment, 12 storeys up, in New York City.
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