Welcome to the Fair!

I just wanted to show some photos from my stand at the fair.
But it is also a very busy time so I will let the photos speak for themselves for now.
Enjoy!

Welcome to the Fair 2!

The book about Swedish Antique Dealers

This is the press release from the publisher, only available in Swedish at the moment I´m afraid.But the book is in both English and Swedish.
You can order it by sending me an email, see details and price (which is way lower than the recommended so don´t hesitate..) to the right.
I know the text is in very small size but just click on it and on the images as well to get a better look.

Rococo chair

Here is one of the six rococo chairs I will be showing at the fair. A beautiful model and personal favorite.
Tomorrow I´ll show you an armchair of the s.k "Swedish model".

Until then; enjoy!

Meet Birdie

Right now life is very hectic as I´m preparing for the largest and most important fair of the year:Stockholm International Antiques Fair.
I´m bringing some very special pieces; a PAIR of cabinets from a Swedish manor house, six rococo chairs, an amazing wall panel and much more, I will post a new blog as soon as I can get some decent photos.
But, as always, time is getting very short and today was not a very good day!

Until I found this.


It´s a faience made for serving butter from and I´ve always wanted one. And now I have this!
It´s a wonderful piece with lots of personality which is difficult to capture in a photo, you really have to see it.
Now comes the ever thrilling search for information, history and origin which is such an interesting, fun and important part of collecting antiques.

Here´s a photo of the bottom part. If any of you can tell me anything about it please send an email or post a comment.

Photo session for the book

Just before Christmas we shot these photos for the book "Svenska Antikhandlare/Swedish Antique Dealers" that is coming out next week.
My idea was to do uncluttered straight forward photos in an environment that had a contemporary feel to it rather than do it in the shop. So much more fun but also SO much more work! Weeks of preparations and then just a few hours of daylight to do the shoot.
But if was worth it, I think.

Thank you, Magnus, thank you Dad (who is 78 and by bad planning had to do a lot of the carrying by himself, Sorry!) and thanks to photographer Per Myrehed.

I will do a new post shortly with the pressrelease and you will also be able to by the book here on the blog.

New acquisitions 1

This lovely gustavian stool is one of my recent acquisitions. It´s round, unusually large and has been restored to it´s original grey-blue paint. Because of it´s proportions and that it retains most of it´s foot endings it looks extremely light and graceful.

The stool is standing on a rococo desk which is on the website and in the background is a fantastic baroque door. I would really have liked to see the cupboard that it once was part of. But, using ones imagination is part of what antiques are about, I think

One of my intentions with this blog is to be able to present new items quicker than on the website ( We actually take our photos for the website in the shop and thus have to remake it into a studio. Those of you who have visited us will understand the difficulty involved in such an undertaking!)

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS; ANALYZE THIS!

This is a very interesting book by Alain de Botton. Questions like these made me curious and excited about what was to come:

"Will minimalism make us happier than ornaments?"

"Why do we argue so bitterly about sofas and pictures?"

For those of us who spend a lot of our time around objects, design and interior architecture a study in aesthetics could be a read well worth while.
Alain de Botton makes you look at architecture and objects from a psychological point of view and has a quote from Stendahl to help him:

"There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness."

That is very true and having read the book I look at rooms and houses I find ugly in a completely different way- what strange inner need made somebody make them? What kind of happiness did they feel? Analyze that!
These few lines make me happy by the way they point out how basic and uncomplicated we can be if analyzed:

"We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need-but are at a constant risk of forgetting we need-within.
We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves."

And this:

"The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend."

Enjoy!

A visit to the shop

Today I decided it was time for some photos from the shop.
As we don´t have this kind of images on the website a lot of you don´t know what it looks like.
Most of the items can be found on our site but some are new; the bedpan cabinet in the window for example. The screen we recently restored to it´s former glory. It´s my personal favourite at the moment.