the do's and don'ts of holiday shopping

You wake up to the sun streaming through the window, not your phone vibrating on the bedside table. Outdoor breakfast doesn't mean a latte and a muffin on the platform worrying if your train is late. You are on vacation and life is good. Why can't real life be more like this, you wonder. Maybe if I buy a tablecloth like the one from the local tavern, my tomato salad will taste the same as in Spain? Perhaps I could upholster the couch with deckchair stripes?

The urge to bring the holiday spirit home via the gift shop runs deep. One summer it's school vacation and you stuff the little pockets of your shorts with shells and pebbles, the next day you're buying a lighter in the shape of a matador for your dorm apartment, and soon you're tall standing and struggling at the house with a vintage garden parasol and a mirror decorated with seashells.

From the desk where I write this, I can see a set of plastic martini with a pattern of pink flamingos glasses I bought at a garage sale in Florida, a wooden hippopotamus that's been lurching in a corner since losing a leg on its way home from Kenya 21 years ago, a blue Cornish jug and white and no less than four balls of snow. I make a mental note to try to control myself the next time I happily stroll through a market after a long lunch.

Lucinda Chambers, the discerning eye behind the mode of life online store Collagerie, spent 25 years traveling the world as fashion director of British Vogue. "I've definitely been that person who falls in love with every new place and gets overly enthusiastic about what I buy," she says, "so I learned from that experience. At Collagerie, they say that shopping , it's "one thing first" - and it's a good rule on vacation. It helps to think carefully about whether something will have a life in your home. Before you buy anything, take a mental walk in your home and if you don't see a place for the object, that may be a sign that it won't work. But, she says, if you really, really like something, you can find a place for it. hearth, however unlikely. "I mean, I have pom poms wrapped around my doorknobs."

But how do you know if it's a knock a heart for the holidays or a piece forever?Don't pull out your wallet unless you experience what Bec Astley Clarke, from the antique store e t online antiques The Italian Collector, calls "a complete yes". A visceral reaction, when your brain and the butterflies in your belly agree that you can't live without it. "Nobody needs more stuff," she says. "Filter everything except the tracks that really sing to you." And beware of recency bias. Holidays this summer may seem emotional right now, especially if this is your first post-Covid escape, but five years from now you won't want to live in a sanctuary in a hotel you spent five days. One gorgeous is a lot.

The joy of holiday shopping is that it doesn't have to be an extravagant expense . One of my treasures is a white jug with "Le Service du Bonheur" on it, which I bought at a flea market in southwestern France in 2005. I paid €1 for it . Chambers, whose home is a glorious mix of antiques, designer pieces and cheap finds, agrees: "You should never be a snob about falling in love, whether with people or with things."

That doesn't mean lowering your taste bar. Kitsch can be fun – I really like a yellow New York cab, I seriously flirted with the Eiffel Tower bookends for my fashion book collection, and I get weak in the face of a snow globe. But beware of cliches. Lisa Lipscomb, an interior designer who rents a chic cabin next to her North Norfolk home, advises against the obvious seaside references of wooden boats on window sills and "Gone Fishing" signs. “The coastal look has been hijacked by tweeness. I prefer to look for pieces that have that sense of coastal magic but are a bit more original. »

Everyone agrees that vintage stores and flea markets are great hunting grounds. "The longer I live in Italy, the more convinced I am that the finest things have already been created - it's a matter of finding them," Astley Clarke says on the phone from his office in Umbria, which houses a 1960s drinks cart .found on a recent trip to Naples.

Chambers suggests looking for something "very typical of the area you're visiting, to bolster that muscle memory of your holiday Southern Spain has a strong tradition in ceramics...