88 12th March 2011 fairs & markets
Retro furniture booms on the coat tails of vintage fashion
Joan Porter reports
TRADITIONAL furniture may be going through a trough, but one area of the market is rising faster than you can say Scandinavian Modernism and
Ercol sideboard. The team behind the Midcentury
Modern show are looking forward to their next event at Dulwich College, London, on Sunday March 20, with justifiable confidence. At their January show there, 3000 people came through the doors in six hours with an absolute scrum round the mid-century furniture and contemporary design pieces. A Vintage Furniture Flea launched last
year in London is set for similar success. The rise in repro, from the top to
the lower ends of the market, almost matches the phenomenal rise in vintage fashion with which it is inexorably linked. Top of the range of shows selling it is
Midcentury Modern, with its emphasis on Scandinavian, European and American furniture and decorative pieces. It was launched in 2003 by Petra
Curtis and Lucy Ryder Richardson at Dulwich College with just 28 mid-mod dealers and 16 contemporary designers.
Above: this c.1960s Danish teak console table is priced at £895 by the Modern Warehouse at the Midcentury Modern show at Dulwich College.
Today, with shows at Bexhill and
Bristol and another due at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London in May, they are now up to capacity at Dulwich with 58 dealers selling mid-century and 30 contemporary designers. These include one to watch among
the upcyclers, according to Petra Curtis; furniture-maker Rupert Blanchard of Styling and Salvage. Meanwhile, the link between vintage
fashion and retro furniture has been noted by Judy Berger of Affordable Vintage Fashion Fairs who holds her second Vintage Furniture Flea attraction on Sunday March 27 in Bethnal Green’s
Betting on Brighton
DEALERS from the antiques markets at Old Spitalfields and Covent Garden will be heading down to Brighton at dawn’s early light this Sunday March 13 for a new antiques and collectors’ market at the town’s racecourse. Michael Collins of Sherman and Waterman, who have run the two London venues for years, says of the Brighton venture: “The racecourse is a great venue, there is already a big car boot down on the Marina on Sunday mornings and we’ve got plenty of local traders standing. Brighton is such a cosmopolitan place and there is no regular antiques fair/market there. I’ve three fairs planned for this year and if it takes off I’m hoping to make it a much more regular event” At the 150-plus stands – £40 a stall, £70 for a double –
there will be all the usual staples of paintings and prints, silver, ephemera, jewellery and furniture. The racecourse has seen mixed results in the past. John Slade
of Take Five Fairs found costs prohibitive and does not intend to repeat the fair he organised there in October but Judy Berger (see above) is confident about her planned vintage flea in May. Contact Michael Collins on 020 7240 7405/07903 919029.
Left: a collection of Art Deco pieces on offer at the 2Cs fair at Ludlow Racecourse byMelanie Caswell. The silver-plated cigarette box is priced at £90, the lamp £320, the electric clock £120 and the tray itself is £125. She has already sold the powder bowl.
A daughter’s switch to Deco
MOTHER-and-daughter team Amelie and Melanie Caswell from Bristol are well known on the datelined fairs circuit, selling Japanese antiques and art. Six months ago Melanie branched out on her own, opening a shop in Bristol called Retro Spective – which she shares with Amelie and her stock of Japanese antiques – selling unusual and quirky pieces from the 1920s to the 1950s with a particularly good line in Deco material. She had a hit with some of this at the 2Cs antiques fair at Ludlow Racecourse in early February. Now she hopes to repeat that run of good fortune on May 21 and 22 at 2Cs next fair at Ludlow. Incidentally, 2Cs’ Stephanie Castell reports that the February fair, fully booked
with 45 stands, saw more than 1300 visitors over the two days. The proof of this rather select fair’s success and that of the reputation of the
organisers, Stephanie and Chinese ceramics dealer Ben Cooper, is that they are fully booked for both May and September at Ludlow. Contact Melanie Caswell on 0117 3309090. 2Cs are on 01544 267481/07981
371961.
York Hall. Judging by the success of the first event in November, it will pack in the retro buyers. Affordable G-Plan coffee tables
and glass cabinets and such 1950s-70s homeware as pineapple-shaped ice buckets, glasses, ceramics and Lava lamps will make up the stock of around 45 dealers. Then on May 15, Judy takes her
furniture flea to Brighton, one of retro’s spiritual heartlands. The racecourse is the venue. Opening times for the fleas are 11 to 4.30.
www.modernshows.com
www.vintagefurnitureflea.co.uk Books to mark
GEORGE Eliot said “a small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles.” Prices may be higher among the 60 book dealers at
the joint Antiquarian Booksellers Association/Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association Fair at the Radisson Blu Hotel on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile this weekend, March 11/12, but the end result is often the same. One eye-catcher is Joseph Grego’s A History of
parliamentary elections and electioneering in the old days, an account of parliamentary insults, satires and caricatures written in 1886. A first edition at £80 is for sale with Ellwood Books of Hampshire. An art collector and journalist, Joseph Grego (1843-1908)
collected and wrote about the greatest satirists of the day including Gillray, Rowlandson, Morland and Cruikshank. At £1350, Devon dealer Richard Wells has JM Richards
High Street, published in 1938 and with 24 illustrations by Eric Ravilious. PBFA are on 01763 248400/ABA on 020 7439 3118
Above: this arresting oil, Monk, by Clifford Fishwick (1923-1997) is one of three by the Lancashire-born artist, which Steve Marsling, a dealer in Modern British and Impressionist Art, based in Mossley, Lancashire, will take to the Bowman Antiques Fair at the Stafford County Showground from March 11-13. Dated 1953, and signed by the artist who became principal of Exeter School of Art, the 10 x 5in (26 x 12cm) oil is priced at £900.
send fair s and mark ets information to joan porter at
fairs@atgmedia.com Fishwick friar
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