Main Street News
All-around artistic visionary Mary Randolph Carter showcases the beauty of the objects we love—and of homes in the local area—in her latest book
Photo above: © Live with the Things you Love: And You’ll Live Happily Ever After, by Mary Randolph Carter, Rizzoli, 2025; all images © Carter Berg.
On March 27 at 6:30pm, best-selling author, photographer, and long-time Ralph Lauren creative director Mary Randolph Carter will appear and present at an event celebrating the release of her newest book, Live With The Things You Love…and you’ll live happily ever after. You don’t want to miss the event, which is presented by Oblong Books in partnership with The White Hart Inn in Salisbury, CT, where the event will be held, and Scoville Memorial Library.
Mary Randolph Carter shares all about her spectacular career path in writing and design, her creative inspiration throughout all of her works, and what makes Live With The Things You Love particularly special and a must-read.
Tell me about your initial educational and career experiences as an author, photographer, and Ralph Lauren creative director that led you to writing books about interior design and home design.
I think I started to write as a child making up stories for my dolls and the little homes I created for them. My mother always told us children (I’m the oldest of nine—six sisters and two brothers) that we were related to Robert Louis Stevenson, so perhaps his Treasure Island inspired my longing to tell stories. Writing has always been part of who I am. From an early age, I filled diaries with my thoughts and aspirations, so perhaps my books continue that desire to share my stories and those of others about how we dream and how we live.
In college I chose to major in English. A junior year in London reading Shakespeare, the Romantics, D.H. Lawrence, and Jane Austen inspired more dedication to writing. In my senior year, I was part of a small group of would-be writers dedicated to sharing our prose and poetry weekly. It was a humbling and inspiring experience. I recently found mimeographed copies of those naive short stories stashed in the top of my family’s cluttered barn in Virginia. Reading them now, I’m shocked I continued to pursue the craft, but I did, and eventually it brought me to New York City as one of Mademoiselle Magazine’s 20 guest editors chosen to edit the August college issue (Sylivia Plath memorialized that experience in her amazing first novel—The Bell Jar).
Following that heady stint, I was hired full-time as a copywriter and years later started telling the stories of “real” women and how they looked and lived as the magazine’s beauty editor! After a decade, I spent a year at New York Magazine originating their first fashion features focused on the way New Yorkers dressed for life in the city. A year later, I returned to Condé Nast to help kickstart a new women’s magazine called SELF (A funny aside—Anna Wintour followed me as fashion editor of New York Magazine before being crowned editor in chief of Vogue!). As creative director for 10 years, I worked with a great team of women committed to creating content to motivate and inspire our readers’ self-confidence at all levels. And then, as fate would have it, in 1987, I met Ralph Lauren and after he agreed to write the foreword to my first book American Family Style, he asked me to join his team/family as head of advertising.
Before I began this journey of almost 40 years, I asked Ralph if I could continue to write my books. He agreed of course, acknowledging that books were part of who I am, and he would not want to inhibit that creative part of my personality and identity. So, throughout my journey, in the cracks of my life and roles as head of advertising and eventually Ralph Lauren Publishing, I wrote my books, and over time oversaw the publication of his!
“In their cozy home in Salisbury, CT, Robin Bell & Paul Hale call this ‘the Red Room.’ Filled with collections of their shared books and objects including her son’s bass violin tucked in the corner at far left,” shares Mary.
When did you first start to write about this topic?
With the publication of American Family Style in 1988, I began to share the stories of how American families live through the seasons with my family’s homes, gardens, and recipes standing in! I took the photographs with my 35 mm Nikkormat. Thankfully, two close photographer friends of mine lent me support and knowledge. One gave me her tripod and the other a workhorse light meter. I had to learn from scratch shooting film and editing hundreds of transparencies. I loved it and continued to shoot and write all my books until my son Carter Berg (who came on Ralph Lauren photo shoots with me while in college and was inspired to become a photographer himself) joined me in visualizing my story telling with his insightful eye and talent.
Is there anything specific that inspired you to follow this path?
After we lost our home to a fire in the early sixties, our family bought and restored a 17th century home in the Tidewater area of Virginia. My mother planted and designed a highly original herb garden punctuated by box bushes and shaded by the original mulberry trees that had been planted there by early English settlers hoping to cultivate a silkworm industry. Unfortunately, they grew the wrong variety, and though their plants didn’t thrive, the gnarled trunks and broad leaves of those mulberries did. Overtime, our home became the subject of many magazine and book features, and one day I thought, “Why don’t we tell our own story?” The answer—American Family Style published in 1988.
What inspired you to write Live With the Things You Love in particular? How would you say it builds upon your existing body of work?
“A lively mix of old and new collectibles in Joan Osofsky’s living room, Lakeville, CT,” observes Mary.
Live With The Things You Love…and you’ll live happily ever after is my 10th book. Spending a lot of time (like all of us) in our homes during the pandemic, I began to look carefully at those objects that gave me the most pleasure, that really were the heart of our home and provided the most comfort during those challenging days. All my books—starting with American Family Style, my “junking” series (American Junk, Garden Junk, Kitchen Junk, and Big City Junk), then For The Love of Old, A Perfectly Kept House Is The Sign of A Misspent Life, Never Stop To Think…Do I Have A Place For This?, and The Joy of Junk—are all essentially about the same thing: love your stuff, no matter how whacky or what other people think. Create a home that is yours, personal and unique, filled with the things you love—collected, handed down, or gifted—that imbue your home with character and comfort!
My books are about the useful of the useless, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that true value lies in the things that are valuable to you. Friends of mine, who live in the heart of Main Street’s world—Lakeville, Salisbury, Hudson, including our village of Millerton—offered to share their stories. Whether it was Joan Osofsky’s garlic press, her tattered copy of Julia Child’s French Cooking, the sampler her daughter had made for her when she was growing up, or Robin Bell’s vintage brass candlesticks camouflaged in layers of melted wax or her funny pink chair that looks like a baseball glove, or Paula Grief’s tiny volume of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, her sculptural rain chain hanging on the wall next to a childhood drawing by her daughter, all speak to the intrinsic magic that loved objects hold for us—memories and stories that remind us of the people and places we have loved.
Tell me about your writing approach and your process for curating various creative perspectives and distinctive interiors in this book. How did you weave self-expression as a common thread throughout?
Mary explains, “Once [we] shoehorned Howard’s mother’s piano in the corner of [our] front parlor it was dubbed ‘The Music Room.’ Most of the artwork relates to musicians!”
Later I transcribe those special stories, listening carefully to their voices, and weave them into my writing. Their descriptions of the things they love and why is the heart of the story and this book.
Self-expression is for sure the common thread of the book. By titling each chapter with the personal style of each subject—”Living with Too Much Stuff” = me, “Living with Less” = Paula, “Living with Old & New” = Joan, “Living with Audacity & Dogs” = Robin—a thread was established, and hopefully the independent spirit of each home!
The photography in the book has a very striking and tangible feel, making it easy to connect with the spaces and the objects featured within them. How did you approach the photographic aspect of this work? What was your vision in terms of what you wanted the book’s imagery to evoke and showcase?
The feel of the pictures is very personal and tied to the style of each home and their curators. That is thanks to the eye of the photographer, Carter, who I have collaborated with so closely on my last three books. We always work together traveling to each destination and discovering the individuality of each home and their owners as we tour each space together. Carter is totally involved with the storytellers, not just snapping pictures, but thoughtfully asking them questions with great warmth and respect and, importantly, a great sense of humor. The goal of this book was to discover the most loved objects in each home and photograph them on their own with great reverence. We traveled with an old piece of homespun linen and sometimes we used it as a portable backdrop for the items. I wanted to distinguish each of the objects from the environment they lived in, to give each their own special moment…and story!
What do you hope readers will take away from Live With the Things You Love? In other words, what was your main objective in writing and publishing this book? What message(s) do you hope to share?
That our homes should be places of refuge, of comfort, of warmth and happiness. The more personal the home, the happier it is. I once read that every single object has a god inside, and that’s why we cherish them. I believe that. So, surround yourself and the people you love with the things that make you smile, that remind you of the time and place you discovered it, the person who gave it to you, the story it tells. Taken together these are the things that create the memory and personality of the places we call home.
In a book release event presented by Oblong Books, in partnership with The White Hart Inn and Scoville Memorial Library, Mary Randolph Carter will appear and present at The White Hart Inn, located at 15 Undermountain Road in Salisbury, CT, on March 27 at 6:30pm. To purchase your tickets, which include a complimentary glass of house wine, beer, or non-alcoholic beverage—plus a $5 voucher towards the purchase of Mary’s book—please click here! You can follow Mary on Instagram here.
