Thursday, May 07, 2020

Our team of eleven professional in house restorers have a combined experience of some 260 years at the highest end of skilled furniture restoration, many having served 7 year apprenticeships and a lifetime honing their talents. For their amusement they sometimes take a look at videos on YouTube of restoration ‘experts’ demonstrating their techniques. A favourite and one of the top videos on YouTube is a chap showing the process of French polishing an antique dining table. If Monty Python were the producers, they couldn’t have done a better job as we see comically a chap with a paint brush coating the table and a young lad following his brush with a hair dryer! If you saw the real technique of French polishing by an expert this comedy show would be akin to someone demonstrating how Constable painted his masterpiece 'The Hay Wain' using a garden rake and children’s poster paints from Woolworths!  Laughable as it is for us to see, the sad truth for the antiques market today, and you the consumer, is people are buying antique furniture that has simply been ruined and this will further decimate values in the future.

On the upside, if you can find a professional antique furniture dealer, with a large stock such as ourselves, then they will gladly show you around their workshops. Most visitors here very much enjoy meeting skilled people from such a niche of expertise surviving today. We have four workshops operating for our cabinet makers, polishers and upholsters, all of whom take great pride in their work not only making furniture look magnificent again but also exactly to our customers specifications. The work that goes into some of our large antique dining tables is so extensive that often a cabinet maker will take a week repairing joints, aligning and levelling in preparation for a weeks work by the hand French polishers to finish. The results speak for themselves and as an inkling of this we have a few videos on our website and well worth a read are the Reviews folk have left for us on Google.
 

'We have been staring the whole day at your stunning furniture, we”re so delighted, what a craftwork !'