Old Furniture Becomes New With Creativity
It used to be simple. There were antiques and there was new furniture, and never the twain would meet. Until there were hybrids.
Hybrids are pieces that combine bits of the past with updated uses: an architectural column made into a lamp, a garden gate turned into a headboard.
Almost all are conversation pieces, and it is this quest for the unusual rather than a lack of antiques that is driving the trend.
At least five dealers at the Triple Pier Antiques Show in New York in March showed salvaged elements given a new raison d’etre.
“Formerly, the market for made-up pieces was decorators in New York and California, but interest has picked up far more widely,” according to one exhibitor, Arthur Smith of Art Smith Antiques in Wells, Maine.
Smith brought a chandelier made of sun-bleached antlers and old iron chains; picture frames made of decorative moldings from vintage homes; and table bases and lamps made from wood turnings.
Prices range from about $85 for table bases to $850 for the chandelier.
But you don’t have to be artistic to turn old things into new uses. You just have to be imaginative. For the do-it-yourself crowd, dealers at the show suggested framing and hanging old maps, currency, stock certificates, letters, sheet music, book covers, antique fans and kimonos.
Old kitchen items make useful bath accessories. Fill big salt shakers with talcum powder, cruet sets with bath oil, and sugar bowls with bath beads. Group old medicine bottles and fill each with a single blossom.
Garden Park Antiques of Nashville, Tenn., specializes in making furniture from antique architectural elements. Keith Merry, the founder, shares metalworking space at his family’s decorative metals business.
“We produce over 100 pieces a year,” Merry says. “Coffee tables are our biggest seller. We build a frame and legs to hold the architectural antique in its original form. A glass top preserves the old piece, as-is.”
Examples? A cocktail table, its top a terra cotta plaque framed in metal and protected under heavy glass. A console table with old hand-wrought iron railing framing a cut limestone table top.
Merry made a table from Roy Acuff’s old wind-up Victrola. It stands in the lobby of the Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry in downtown Nashville. And a 12-foot-long dining table for Garth Brooks was made from an iron gate from 19th-century France.
At one time, Merry cleaned the metals of rust and flaking paint. Now he covets the battered look.
“I’ll pay twice as much if a piece has its original finish,” he says. “People love flaking and cracking paint.”
Prices range from $200 for a lamp to about $4,000 for a headboard.
Merry isn’t worried about savaging antiques for the sake of art. Most of his raw materials, he says, were castoffs “moldering in a salvage yard somewhere.”
xxxx Garden Park Antiques, Nashville, Tenn.; (615) 254-1996.