marie

Unique gifts seem more and more difficult to find.  Items with personality, especially with a story to tell, simply are not available at the mall or mass retailers.  Rare gifts guarantee no one else will be giving or receiving such a unique item. Over the past year we have been searching for just such gifts, one-of-a-kind items with the quality we are proud to offer.  In the coming weeks we will be featuring those finds in our newsletters and on our website. And, to make these gifts even more special, we have paired some of them with products from specialty shops [...]

We’ve been sitting around fires for a long, long time.  According to the National Academy of Sciences, the earliest discovered fire pit blazed over 1 million years ago.  It’s only natural that some improvements have been made since then. The earliest chimneys – dating from the 1500s, were large enough to accommodate a chimney sweep, in the hopes of staving off chimney fires – a fairly regular occurrence. In fact, it’s easy to date British homes by the size of their chimneys: pre-1850, large chimneys for multiple flues and small sweepers, post-1850 for stovepipes only – no sweeping needed. Then there is the [...]

In spite of the fact that coffee had been a wildly popular drink in England since the mid-17th century (replacing, BTW, the previously favored breakfast drinks of wine and beer), there was no such thing as a coffee table. Instead, the beverage was drunk in commercial establishments with massive followings. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house was the precursor to Lloyds of London where stock traders congregated at their coffee “local”, eventually the basis for what was to become the London Stock Exchange. On the home front, however, only tea and tea accessories were the furnishings of the day. That is, until in the late [...]

People have been enamored with antiques since the search for Greek relics began back in the 12th century. It is not unusual for those with a love of “the hunt” to spend millions searching the sea for sunken treasure or hours and hours waiting for the telltale beep of a metal detector. For most of us, antiquing is our equivalent of a treasure hunt. The prize doesn’t need to be an ancient relic, either. Although government officials define an antique as anything more than 100-years-old, the truth is any item with some age, wonderful patina and a sense of history is all [...]

It is speculated that Peking Man roasted meats – though not proven. What is known is that during the Paleolithic Period, that’s 33,000 years ago, people living in southern France (where else?) began to steam their food over hot embers by wrapping it in wet leaves. It wasn’t until the 16th century, when Catherine de Medici arrived in France from Florence, that steaming entered the modern cooking lexicon. For her marriage to Henry II she brought a humdinger of a dowry, introducing milk-fed veal, baby peas, artichokes, broccoli and pasta. Also for the first time, the French court tasted such delicacies as zabaglione, scaloppini [...]

Here’s a sentence you never thought you’d read: We have the Black Plague to thank for extension tables. Before that time, tables were little more than a plank set upon a trestle base, temporarily pinned in place. Unused tables were dismantled by servants and set aside for the next meal. But the Plague decimated the world's population, including servants. Large assemblies of folks eating together were a thing of the past. Add to that the religious persecutions under Henry VIII, and it became unwise to speak freely at mass gatherings. So tables became smaller and "fixed" with permanent tops and bases. Coincidentally, the concept of [...]

The treasures we’ve assembled here were once a customary part of any well-to-do household. Now days, they are atypical – adding individuality and character to your home. Plus, they have great back stories! Take the fans, for instance. During the 19th century, to separate oneself from field laborers, the trend among the upper class was to have the whitest skin possible. So makeup was created using a mixture of beeswax and white lead paint. The resulting application worked perfectly just as long as one sat away from the fireplace. Too close and the beeswax and white-face melted away. Hence the invention [...]

Many believe civilization was enabled by fire and light. From a bundle of sticks tied together and lit, to a hollow shell bright with flaming moss soaked in animal fat, flammables were the driving force moving civilization forward. The earliest candle, from China in 200BC, literally enlightened the world. Fast forward through beeswax, tallow, spermacetti and paraffin. Then, made from a derivative of coal, the miracle of gas lighting changed the world again. In the 1840s, it was all the rage. Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine recommended that [for parties] “you must close the shutters and draw the curtains, the better to show off [...]

In 1650, the British East India Company gambled on importing two new commodities found in China.  The first was tea, the second, porcelain wine ewers.  Because the ewers were breakable, they were packed for the long voyage inside the bales of tea.  The British, unaware that the Chinese steeped tea in individual cups, concluded that the bulbous ewers must be for tea preparation, despite the pesky problem of the leaves pouring out the spout.  Soon the first teapots, special porcelain ewers with an integral strainer at the base of the spout, were being ordered for export. The high cost of [...]

It’s only been in the past 50 years that the work of illustrators has been recognized as art. Even some artists themselves argued that the real art was the finished product, the print. As a result, no one handled an illustrator's work with any consideration for value or posterity.  Such a loss of creativity! Consider the craft of these earliest illustrators.  Before 1820, the artist covered a copper plate with wax, then carved the design onto the plate with a knife-like tool. Each illustration took 6-8 hours to complete and left the artist with bloodied fingers. After about 100 impressions the [...]