As I sat with designer Charyl Coleman, she painted a picture of a 19th-century woman weaving a piece of string into a lace bedspread.

She described the sense of community that came with imagining where the woman’s thoughts ran as she crafted something that would outlive the world she knew. Coleman gushed about the beauty of her own hands touching the very piece of lace handcrafted by another woman decades earlier. I quickly learned that, for Coleman, antiques are not simply slices of history: they are representations of real moments in time on to which we can still hold.

“We live in a world of so much reproduction,” Coleman says. “But I’m attached to the things that are loved, used, worn and held on to.”

As we walked through one of her client's homes, Coleman introduced me to a world of salvaged history. Her design has brought new life to iron scraps, vintage velvet and large, tattered church windows. She made hand-woven rugs from centuries past relevant and useful again. She transformed simple Belgian linen curtains into works of art using accents from metallic, ceremonial robes and antique crochet pieces.

Coleman revives moments in history long past, but not lost.

“We have so many options: copper roofs, copper clad windows. It’s amazing,” Coleman says of local resources. And although she has always found inspiration in those finds, Coleman has not always lived where these resources were available or even considered.

For eight years prior to settling in Austin, Coleman and her husband lived in a Kickapoo village in Mexico. At this time, the village had no running water, electricity or roads. There was no design, but there was the associated sense of tradition and appreciation for handwork that radiates from Coleman’s design today.

In 1980, Coleman and her family came to Austin. They opened an antique store on South Congress, and it was there that she met Carol Bolton, whose creative genius Coleman credits for her own success. The two worked together on various projects including the original design at Hotel Havana in San Antonio and displays at Homestead in Fredericksburg.

She never considered residential design until a four-hour fabric consultation turned into a four-year project and a redesigned home. This work laid the foundation for her career today.

As we continued walking through the home of a current client, Coleman explained what she calls "editing" — fusing a client’s existing belongings with her own gems. Her editing was particularly impressive in a weathered, wooden cabinet that seamlessly displayed the homeowner’s handmade shell art along with antique dishes that Coleman found. She beautifully braided together pieces of our world’s history with the family’s items, through every inch of the home, to create a seemingly predestined feel.

Coleman features each piece in the home as if it were the first time she was seeing and falling in love with it. She was exceptionally attached to the property's boathouse, likely because it felt like home. It was in this innately peaceful space that Coleman relied on her own taste for inspiration: although simple in nature, the boat house was not lacking in refined creativity or attention to detail. From the antique train car-turned-coffee table to the worn yet charming step stool in the kitchen, the boathouse was yet another cohesive mixture of times past.

Coleman described her style as narrative and said there is a story to be told in any house, and her dedication to this task was evident everywhere. Not a single decision, down to displaying the client’s collections of sailor’s valentines and tin boxes, was made without scrupulous consideration for the story at hand.

The designer's love and appreciation for antiques assists in her story-telling. “Beauty is an inherent paradigm. With antiques, that beauty has a history and soulfulness, and I feel fortunate to be able to bring that to form.”