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The Facade Blog

2010/07/15
The Secret Fire
One cold winter's night around midnight, Grace and I were sitting in her new room supposed to be finishing our Latin homework. While I fumbled with the dictionaries, Grace was idly playing with a candle in an old fashioned candle holder - the sort Wee Willie Winkie used, enamel plated with a ringed handle and taken from the Facade to decorate her new room. She was (she now declares, "I can't think why!") tearing small pieces of paper, dipping them in the molten wax in the candlestick's moat, setting light to them, then dropping them into the wax.
Suddenly (perhaps unsurprisingly) the candle holder burst into flames and Grace went, "wah!" and dropped it to the floor.
It landed upright and continued to burn brightly.
In a panic we looked around for a glass of water to throw on the flames, but there was none. Then I saw Grace's hot water bottle and said, "Quick! Pour the water on the flames!"
So we grabbed the hot water bottle...and couldn`t for the life of us unscrew the stopper. The flames were growing, stretching more than a foot high, eating the candle for fuel and flickering wildly. Grace used her scientist`s brain: "grab the waste-paper bin!"
"But we can`t throw it in there - it will catch fire!"
"No - empty it and throw it over the flames. It will starve them of oxygen."
The bin was made of copper (another antique pilfered from the shop) so we emptied it and slammed it down over the burning candlestick from above.
There was a silence and a big phew of relief.
After a while we decided to lift the bin up to see if the fire was out. We lifted it and...almost immediately the room was filled with smoke. At first we were just coughing and holding our jumpers over our noses, but we realized we would have to get out fast. I remember crawling along the green carpet towards the door, gasping, my eyes stinging.
We managed half an hour later to return to the room and open the windows.

The next morning we discovered a bin-sized patch of black, burnt carpet. We dragged a rug over it in terror that Gay would discover how close we had come to burning the Facade to cinders (sorry, Gay!).
Ten years later Grace uncovered the burnt patch while packing up to move to Japan, and had to confess!





2010/05/13
The Great Grace's Room Cleanup
My memories of the old Facade tend to drift towards rats. Not scary, infestation, plague-ridden sewer rats, but beautiful, funny, furry friends. Grace brought them home from the school biology lab. Sminthos was a huge, white rat named after the Ancient Greek for "mouse." He had a thick, long tail that seemed to have a life of its own. Sappho was a slightly smaller brown rat. They lived in a luxuriously sawdust-laden cage with added cage extensions, as befits a Notting Hill dwelling, but were allowed out regularly for exercise around Grace's room. They would frequently lose themselves amongst piles of books, soft toys, random pieces of antique furniture, and heaps of clean washing.

Before the rats, the Facade had a tank full of fish that ate one another in turn until the last one floating was so fat it died of a heart attack.

Then there was Ben, the beautiful golden retriever, who liked walks on Primrose Hill and is much missed.

Although there were no horses at the Facade, a lot of life there revolved around horsiness. Each morning Wanda and Grace got up at five a.m. to cycle the ten or so miles to Richmond, where they would muck out at the stables, groom the horses, go for a quick ride, then cycle all the way home again to get ready for school. When I first knew Grace she usually wore muddy jodphurs and riding boots as most of her life was spent at the stables between sleep and school.

When we were about 16, Wanda went to university to become a vet, and Grace moved into Wanda's room. Emily and I volunteered to help Grace clear out her old room. Foolishly, perhaps...
Grace's room had pictures of horses all over the walls, completely covering the ceiling, and over every available surface (apart from the door, which had Garbage Pail Kids stickers instead). Then books and toys were crammed into nook and cranny, a Victorian copy of Homer's Iliad in the original next to toy Trolls and books of Gnomes. Physics A Level texts and teenage pony books. Some memorable plastic see-through models of the human body. And in the middle of this was a huge pile.

It took us some hours, but eventually we had everything cleared and sorted except for the huge pile in the middle of the room. We sat and regarded the pile. Decided to have some tea and think about it. Took some nice photos (not sure if they're available to post here!). The pile was browny-beige, and appeared to be made of sawdust mostly, with chunks of mud and grass here and there. We decided a black binliner was probably the best place for it. So we began to scoop and dig and eventually the pile diminished into an unfathomably comfortable looking dried-up puddle of...horse poo.

Over the years of taking off jodphurs and chucking them on the floor, Grace had manured her grass-green carpet until it had a pool of fertile deep brown muck.

I wish I could find the photos to scan in for you...





2010/04/21
Facade First Impressions
I first met Grace, daughter of The Facade, at school twenty years ago. In a physics lesson she drew me a map of her home to prepare me for my first visit to the antique shop and the maisonette above. I remember being awed by her quick sketching, her scribbled diagrams in colourful biro, and struck by the minute detail of the piles of clean washing placed on the stairs for the girls to pick up on their way up to their rooms. I was also intrigued by a big, black hole in the middle of the shop floor...

When I visited Grace's house we entered through the shop and I found myself immersed in a glittering den of chandeliers, shining lampshades and rainbows of glass beads. As I gasped, Grace said, "look out!" and grabbed my arm as I was about to drop into the black hole: an uncovered trapdoor descending into the musty cellar below.

The shop was like the deck of a ship, with its open hatch leading to the dark hold where wiring and repairs took place and its quarterdeck mezzanine level where Gay sat welcoming customers from behind her desk. The floorboards creaked and the lights rattled as I passed as if rustled by a breeze. I felt like I was in a pirate's treasure cove: everwhere I looked things glittered and sparkled, winking at me from dusky corners.

Grace led me up well-trod wooden steps to the back of the shop, where, edging carefully between antiques, we went through a small door leading to the living quarters...

"Can I use your loo?"
"Yes, it's just here -"
She flung open the door behind me and I spun round just in time to face a bottom and a yell,

"Aaaargh! Who are YOU!?!"

So I met Grace's sister Wanda for the first time.



Author: Rowan





2010/04/20
New Facade Blogger
From now on, we are lucky to have Facade stories featured on our blog written by Rowan (best friend of Grace, daughter of Facade's owner Gay). She has had first-hand experience for the last 20 years of the goings on at the Facade...


Author: Gay



2009/11/02
on approval
A lot of our customers have been taking goods on approval recently. We don't mind this as we know it is sometimes difficult to imagine things in situ and most of the borrowers end up buying whatever they try.

We were mentioned in The Lady and The Sunday Telegraph's Stella Magazine last month.

I thought I would put a picture of our dog on here as she's rarely seen in the shop as she barks at the customers. Although she's only saying hello some of them don't know that!





2009/10/04
new delivery
Nick has bought a really good lot of chandeliers this week. Some quite large and all interesting. There are a couple of designs that I have never seen before and I've seen a few in all the years I've been dealing in them!!



2009/09/25
Dick in his workshop
Another busy week and Dick has lots of work!





2009/09/19
So busy
It's been so busy I haven't had time to do the blog! The last two weeks have been frantic but we're not complaining. A lot has gone out and, more important to our customers, a lot has come in. We have a particularly elegant pair of hall lanterns among other things.



2009/09/04
The World of Interiors
Someone came in yesterday who had seen the feature on us in The World of Interiors magazine in January last year. It amazes me that this still happens. I suppose it is the kind of publication that people keep for reference. We do ourselves!



2009/08/26
Our restorer
Our restorer Dick has been attending a CPD electrical course to keep up with current practices. He has a workshop at the back of The Facade.





2009/08/11
activity
There was quite a lot of activity in the shop last week. The Newark and Swinderby antique fairs always bring customers from Japan, USA and other parts of Europe as well as sellers and a few of them sell to and buy from us. It keeps Nick and me busy!



2009/08/02
Italian Chandeliers
Yesterday Nick brought in ten Italian chandeliers. Two rather grand 'bags',a heavy bronze one with large grey drops, a large stylish 60's glittering number and various medium sized and smaller.

We are expecting to get a delivery of French mirrors in the next week sometime.





2009/07/20
All our chandeliers are old
Just a reminder to our customers that all our chandeliers are old so we don't have a brochure as, apart from the occasional set or pair, they are not repeated.



2009/07/16
Flemish chandeliers
We have in stock a range of seventeenth century style 1940's/50's Flemish brass chandeliers and some decorative hanging lights made from antlers.



2009/07/13
We started blogging!
To keep up with the times we have started a blog for The Facade so everyone can keep up to date with when new stock comes in, our holidays and any other news we have! Watch this space...