Vintage & Retro Ideal Home

We All Love Vintage

It seems that everyone is talking about vintage & retro. We want to live in Erno Goldfinger’s 1968 vintage, Trelick Tower, West London – where nobody wanted to live in the eighties – and similar buildings now considered stylish. Miami’s art deco South Beach, once destined for wholesale demolition, is now one of the trendiest and noisiest holiday destinations on earth. We want vintage retro furniture for our homes and vintage & retro home wares. Vintage rugs and the vintage curtains that our mothers gave to the ragman are now changing hands in shops selling vintage,  in markets and vintage textile fairs in North America, the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Vintage tea and coffee services are appearing on our vintage Scandinavian shelving units and we are sitting at vintage G-Plan dinning tables. We pull iPhones from the pockets of vintage denim jackets and, using the new Hipstamatic app, take digital black and white photographs that we can manipulate and distress to appear vintage. We drive vintage second cars and motorcycles – on which we wear vintage helmets and leathers – and we take nostalgic trips to our childhood destinations, like Brighton and Southend.

Of course, every generation looks back nostalgically to the foggy world of childhood, recalling new memories of that “foreign country” at the sight of a long forgotten wallpaper design or a faux leather armchair. As we scan our childhood photographs onto our hard-drives we recall the world of our parents and hanker after the musty comfort of our mother’s perfume lingering in an open wardrobe. We feel the sticky seats of the Ford Anglia on the backs of our bear legs during a summer day trip to Theydon Bois. We spot that favourite rug, with the naff design, made with the Rug Kit we received for Christmas and slaved to produce. It probably disappeared into the bin along with our Painting By Numbers masterpieces, sometimes even before they were finished. How we would like to be able to buy it all back, we think.

Now we probably can buy it all back, or we can try, but we have competition. We aren’t the only ones who want it. The young, who seem to have no interest in antiques are also buying vintage and not for nostalgia – they like it. Men and women in their late teens and early twenties, students and young homemakers are wearing vintage clothing and surrounding themselves with vintage & retro home wares. They also like vintage technology, buy vintage computers and Sinclair calculators. They think the Sinclair C5 is cool, they’re wearing vintage Hawaiian shirts and retro Chelsea boots. Their heroes wear vintage too and sell it. Lily Allen is giving up her career as a pop star to become a vintage rag trader with her venture, Lucy In Disguise. She will be opening her shop, which will also hire out vintage clothing at Vintage Goodwood, the festival for people who want to camp out and listen to music, but keep their feet dry too.

If you are buying vintage & retro homewares an invaluable source of reference is the Daily Mail Ideal Home series of annuals, produced from the late 1940s until the end of the 1950s. What was the best of contemporary design then is the most sought-after for the retro vintage look now. The Ideal Home annuals are very collectable, but still available from Amazon at quite modest prices.

Vintage Rag Trader – A Vintage Place – Home