For Lily Barfield, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Growing up in Louisiana, she recalls accompanying her mother to antique stores, and she comes from a family of, as she puts it, “epic hosts.” No surprise, then, that the creator behind the Instagram account and online shop Lily’s Vintage Finds has just opened The Marlene, a nine-room inn in Houston, which also houses her shop’s first physical storefront. “I have always loved antiques and vintage pieces,” she tells Business of Home. “I was somebody who got dragged around to estate sales by my mom. As soon as I got my first job and moved into my own place, immediately I [realized] these beautiful pieces that we were raised with, it’s a different type of quality than what you would find from a big-box store.”
Barfield launched her Instagram account in 2021 to show off and sell her vintage finds to friends. Her following grew quickly, and she was soon able to leave her nine-to-five to devote all of her time to content creation, where she documents her antiques sourcing—she peruses estate sales, thrift stores, consignment stores and antique malls and loves a trip to France. The account now has nearly 50,000 followers.
Coming from a family of hosts, she knew she wanted to one day continue the tradition. “I’ve always had this real desire to create a place for people that felt like the places that I was raised: warm, welcoming, lots of laughter, and a place you want to keep coming back to,” she says. “It was always my dream to combine my love of antiques with some sort of hospitality concept—to fill an old house to the brim with antiques and then let people experience the warmth and the beauty of a space of collected interiors.”
That old house came in the form of an early-1900s neoclassical mansion that Barfield stumbled upon while scrolling Zillow. The historic property is in Houston’s eclectic Montrose neighborhood. “It was a residential home, and to be frank, [my husband and I] didn’t have any real plan at that time, but we walked into the space and it was immediate: We both looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve got to make this work,’” she recalls. “We knew we had to find a way to make a commercial space out of this and open it up to the public.” Flash-forward a year and a half, and The Marlene is open for business.
The inn boasts nine uniquely decorated guest rooms alongside her company’s first brick-and-mortar presence. Barfield wanted guests to not only be able to shop from her selection of sourced pieces, but also immerse themselves in a space with a lived-in feeling to help them visualize the possibilities of decorating with antiques—something she wasn’t able to do in the larger showrooms she had been in, where she only occupied a vignette or a small corner. “Now I think with The Marlene, even though the only items that are going to be for sale are in the shop, you can still walk around and show people, This is how you could use an antique in this space. This is how you could style an entryway. Like, we have an antique drapery table that we made into a sink,” she says. “That’s what I’m really excited about—the ability for people to be able to look around and see how a space feels when you fill it to the brim with these older pieces.”
Barfield was inspired by New Orleans and French design when creating the interiors. “There’s something really unique about the design in New Orleans, in particular—it’s definitely as much about how the space feels as it is how it looks,” she says. “There’s just this very unfussy but still elevated aesthetic I feel like you only find there.” The layered art collections, rich textiles from Brunschwig & Fils and Rubelli, furniture from Doorman Designs, and of course, antiques sourced from France and beyond, all help to evoke that feeling.
“I can tell you where every piece was sourced, what century it’s from, who might have owned it, or even just a funny tidbit about us sourcing it,” she says. A hallmark of the space is Bar Madonna, a cocktail bar boasting a 10-foot 19th century Madonna painting Barfield found in France and a hand-painted ceiling mural by local artist Mary Evans of Verdigris Finishes. “I hope guests can feel when they walk in, that it’s a space that was designed with a lot of intention and thought, and it’s a space to be lived with and used,” she says. “We want people to feel comfortable there, and we want them to really sink in and enjoy the space.”
