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Posted on July 5, 2017 by Paul Cody

Vintage Matters Commercial Furniture Project London

OUR LATEST COMMERCIAL PROJECT

We hope you are having a good Summer!

Over the past few months, we have been busy working with a London based furniture consultancy, who provide innovative solutions to offices, universities, restaurants and private residences.

Their client, Havas – an award-winning, global advertising and PR company, were moving to a new HQ, called HKX (Havas Kings Cross) and Vintage Matters were given the brief to supply vintage furniture for their new cafe, restaurant and reception area.

We worked closely with the design team, getting a good understanding of their needs and requirements for the various pieces of furniture, as well as timing and budget and then 3 weeks later presented our ideas on what was available out in the vintage markets.

We proposed visuals showing various styles of tables and chairs for the cafe and restaurant, along with guideline pricing and finally agreed on the overall look and aesthetic, the various spaces should have.

Off we went into the markets, sourcing vintage oak and mahogany tripod tables and bentwood cafe chairs. Good, well constructed chairs like these are hard to find these days, as they are in high demand for their vintage look and durability, especially the classic bentwood chairs, designed by Thonet.

Thonet was the pioneer of having light, strong wood bent into curved, graceful shapes, by forming the wood in hot steam. He produced his “Nr1” chair in 1850 and a year later won a bronze medal at the Great Exhibition in London!

We eventually sourced 58 vintage cafe chairs.

An important piece of furniture we had to source, was a very large statement table for the Havas reception area and we found this amazing 3.5 metre limed oak table.

Circa 1880, this table was originally used in the kitchen of a stately home in Bedfordshire and now takes pride of place in the new Havas reception at HKX!

If you have an upcoming project for a commercial space that requires vintage furniture and accessories, where we can help add personality and charm, then please email [email protected]

We are currently working on a very exciting commercial project for a large online retailer 😉

….watch this space!

Thank you.

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Paul Cody

Vintage Furniture London Online

VINTAGE FURNITURE

When we are out in the markets, we are always on the hunt for unusual, beautiful and most importantly, useful pieces of vintage furniture to bring an environment to life for our customers.

We source for retailers, offices, hotels, restaurants and cafes as well as individuals and find that more and more people are looking for that “special piece” of furniture, to add personality to a space.

Vintage Black Chest of Drawer

Recently we sold this amazing vintage school shoe rack (below) to a hotel in Germany. They told us they had been trying to source something like this for months for their lobby and this was just perfect.

It’s so satisfying sourcing and supplying for companies and people when you can find them that perfect piece. It is often really difficult for people to know exactly what they want until they see it, and that’s how Vintage Matters can help. We are regularly sent photographs of spaces or rooms and asked to find furniture or props to work in the space.

Our vintage leather club armchairs that we source from France are hugely popular, as they add such character to a space and are amazingly comfortable. We supply Le Labo Fragrances with these chairs, for their retail stores in the UK and Europe.

We are always on the lookout for those special pieces for our retail customers too, like this old vintage wooden workbench below, which is an ideal piece for displaying product on.

Researching the provenance of a vintage piece is always fun and interesting. We found that this workbench was used by a company called Frederick Pollard, who were established in 1911 in Leicester and were the makers of high speed drills.

Old bakers racks, factory shoe racks or fruit drying racks, like the one below, are really versatile pieces of furniture and can be used in so many rooms within a house. They provide a great deal of storage space and are also ideal in a retail environment providing a great display piece for visual merchandising. We think they look pretty cool too!

We are excited to be working on a large commercial project, sourcing numerous pieces of industrial and mid century furniture pieces for a huge reception space, opening this Summer in Shoreditch, London. We can’t say who it is right now, but we think you will know them!

We have found some pretty cool pieces, which we are being reupholstered, so they comply with all UK fire regulations.

Our vintage beer table and bench sets are now back in stock! These are authentic pieces, originally used at various beer festivals in Germany and are perfect for al fresco dining or outdoor entertaining, this Summer.

The orange painted pine table is heavy duty and sturdy, with two wooden benches with folding green steel legs. It has a very simple but effective design, that has stood the test of time, that makes each piece quickly and easily fold flat for storage.

We have to mention our vintage school chairs on this blog, as people really connect with them, reminding them of old school days! These authentic chairs were hugely popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s, not only in schools, but in hospitals, community centres and church halls, as they took up much less space when stacked.

These vintage stacking school chairs are ideal for the home, a cafe or restaurant, or office, wanting a vintage look and with lots of different styles and coloured frames to choose from.

So, if you are looking for a special, unique piece of vintage furniture for your home or business, please email [email protected] with a description, approximate dimensions and your budget and we will happily source for you and send you photos when we are out in the markets.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Paul Cody

Reclaimed Letters | Competition | London | Vintage Matters

WIN A RECLAIMED VINTAGE LETTER!

As I am sure you all aware we have a thing for letters!

We personally, have been collecting vintage, reclaimed and salvaged letters ourselves for years and then we started reconditioning them to sell at Vintage Matters. As I’m sure you can imagine our collection just keeps growing, as we can’t resist a bit of beautiful or unusual type.

We source our letters globally, which gives us a fantastic variety – from illuminated to non-illuminated and in a variety of materials, from metal to wood to resin.

Like so many of our products we wonder what life they had previously and how they were used – most are reclaimed from shop fronts, pubs, railways and demolished buildings.

We love to know the provenance of our letters – some you instantly recognise like the red T.G.I Friday ones above and some stunning Mercedes Benz letters that have just come in.

Sometimes we just hit a blank though, like we did when we found a number of blue and yellow letters at a market – then in a light bulb moment, realised they were from Blockbuster Video stores!

We still have some of these letters available at www.vintagematters.co.uk/letters/

Mostly we have our letters for purely decorative purposes, lovingly scattered around our home, but they can also be used for branding or signage in bars, cafes, pubs, retail stores, offices etc., both inside and out, to make a real statement.

The image below shows a mix of vintage letters and letter lights that we sprayed red, for a commercial project, showing the company’s name in their reception area.

Some of our favourite reclaimed letters we stock are these amazing large illuminated ones that we get from the US – everything just seems bigger and bolder from there!

When they arrive though, they certainly need some serious tender love and care. Most of them would have been exterior signage, so have been out in the elements for most of their lives, which gives them great character and also means they need some work before we can get them online.

When they arrive with us, the first job is taking them apart and giving them a good clean. Even though we are aware they have been used outside, we are still amazed by the amount of dirt and tumble weed that has collected inside – maybe they were formally lighting up the strip in Vegas?!

When we open the channel letters for cleaning, we strip out all the old glass neon tubes and wiring, which is not a particularly fun job, but very necessary.

In order to return them to their former glory and for them to be electrically safe, we recondition them with new LED’s and a UK 3-pin plug.

This has taken a certain amount of practice to get the lighting correct and also takes a fair amount of patience, fixing the LED’s around all the serifs and bends that our letters tend to have. Once we have wired them up and checked we have a good even glow, they are ready for photography, though sometimes we have to cut new light omitting acrylic fronts, if they have too many marks or cracks and replace any trims that are too worn.

It’s always a fine balance with vintage pieces, just how many character marks we allow before replacing or cleaning it up. We one have one simple rule or question that we ask ourselves – would we be happy buying that piece and having it in our house? If the answer is “yes”, then it is good to photograph and get online to find a new home.

Our letters look fantastic hung on a wall or on a book shelf and make for an amazing personal gift for someone, or start collecting your initials.

We have a huge amount of reclaimed and salvaged letters that are coming online so keep a look out, or contact [email protected] if you are looking for a specific letter.

This week sees the start of a competition, in collaboration with our friends at Warehouse Home, where you can win one of our salvaged letters*, simply by logging on to Twitter, retweeting the competition and following both @mywarehousehome and @vintagematters for a chance to win a letter of your choice that we have online.

You can also follow us on Instagram as @vintagemattersuk or our new feed, which is for fans of fonts and typography, where we have branded ourselves @thelettermenuk !

Good luck in the competition!

* the competition is to win one of our salvaged letters from a shop front or pub and does not include our letter lights

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Paul Cody

25 Beautiful Homes Feature

Our home in 25 Beautiful Homes

Early in the new year we were contacted by a freelance journalist and photographer partnership who were potentially interested in doing a photo shoot of our home, if it was “nice”, of course! So we sent a few amateur photos, which excited them sufficiently to want come and do a shoot, which they then offered to various interiors magazines.

When they told us 25 Beautiful Homes had picked up the feature for their May edition, we were both relieved (“thank God it’s not just us and family & friends that like our taste!”) as well as excited/proud.

Unfortunately we didn’t make the front cover….

Our home is an evolving showcase of what we have coming into the business and going through the business. It’s a constantly changing home, which is a blessing and a bit of a curse, at times! We’ll go out sourcing with a new collection in mind, then end up having a new medicine cabinet for our bathroom that we want to keep, one week, or a travel themed take over the next!

At the time of the photo shoot, we had Collection G (fireside) about to launch, as well as all our utilitarian and bar collections around, hence why you see a lot of the stock that we are selling in the photos!

Unfortunately the magazine decided the whole article seemed like a story about Vintage Matters rather than our home and they edited out the fact that a large majority of the pieces in the photos were, in fact , available for sale from Vintage Matters, such as the antlers, bar cart, soda syphons, green bottles, mirrors, suitcases, and bakers rack etc., etc.

We were more than happy to see our home published in 25 Beautiful Homes!

If you are interested in our home or products, please get in touch and we will also keep you up to date with any events we are doing.

Our next pop up event is at Spitalfields Market, London on Thursday 28th April.

www.vintagematters.co.uk

E: [email protected]

T: 07738 042 573