There is one fairly obvious problem with becoming an antique dealer. You occasionally have to sell the things.
I have a rule that pieces bought for the atelier are not for me. They come in, I photograph them, list them and, hopefully, send them off to their next home.
Mostly, I'm very good at this.
And then there were these stools.
I had never seen anything quite like them.
I've seen plenty of brutalist and primitive stools over the years - chunky timber, tripod legs, roughly worked surfaces. I love them, but they're certainly not impossible to find.
These were different.
Made in France around the 1950s-60s, each stool had been carved from substantial pieces of solid timber, with all the irregularity of the original wood still very much present. They were heavy, rough and wonderfully primitive.
But then someone had gone and carved the tops into sunbursts.
That was it for me.
All that weight and solidity, and then this completely unnecessary, almost whimsical detail around the top. The edges projected out like rays, or the teeth of some strange wooden cog. They were rough but pretty. Solid but playful. A little brutal and a little ridiculous.
Perfect.
I remember looking at them and thinking that I wanted to go back in time and meet whoever made them.
I knew we would have been friends.
That's one of my favourite things about dealing in old objects. Occasionally you find something where the personality of the person who made it still feels present.
I'll never know who made these stools. They're unsigned, and perhaps they were never intended to be important pieces of design at all. Maybe someone simply needed two stools and happened to have a very good idea.
I almost prefer not knowing.
There is something lovely about an anonymous maker, somewhere in mid-century France, deciding that a perfectly functional wooden stool also needed a sunburst carved around its seat.
It certainly didn't need one.
But thank God they did it anyway.
That's the difference, I think, between an old object and an object that stays with you.
Age alone doesn't make something interesting. Nor does provenance, a famous name or a particularly valuable material. Sometimes it's simply an idea - one odd decision made by somebody decades ago that gives an otherwise ordinary object its personality.
It's something I look for constantly when sourcing for the atelier.
The detail that didn't need to be there.
The slightly strange proportion.
The unnecessary flourish.
The thing that makes me stop scrolling and think, what on earth is that?
These stools had all of it.
And then I sold one, I panicked. Its ok, I still have one - and by the time I had talked myself out of my No1 rule (don't keep stock for yourself) - the second one sold.
Which was, technically, the entire point.
Less technically, I have regretted it ever since.
I've looked high and low for another pair. At this stage I'd happily settle for one lonely stool for my own dream home. I've searched every combination of primitive, brutalist, carved, French, sunburst and rustic I can think of. I've contacted my suppliers, sellers, french friends and even enemies.
Nothing.
I've found plenty of beautiful old stools. I've found things that share elements of them. But I've never found another with that same combination of crude hand-carving and whimsy.
And perhaps I never will.
That's the frustrating part of dealing in antiques and vintage design. There isn't always another one.
You can't call the supplier and reorder it. You can't wait for next season's production. Sometimes an object passes through your hands once and that's it.
Of course, that's also exactly what makes this job so addictive.
You keep looking because every now and then, amongst hundreds of perfectly good things, you find something you've genuinely never seen before.
And when that happens, I've learnt there are apparently two options.
Sell it.
Or spend the next several years trying to find it again.
Next time, I might keep the bloody stool.
