Antiques

Fresh to the Market

In the 1950s, when the antiques world was steeped in glossy mahogany and oil paintings with provenance, along came the Lacquer Chest to buck the trend for grandeur. Specialising in domestic and decorative items overlooked by the trade, the shop has been supplying quirky collectables from its Kensington site since the days when London swung
Kensington Church Street Lacquer Chest
The shop on Kensington Church Street has always been the ideal location to track down 19th-century botanical studies, nautical oddities, as well as pink and silver lustreware. Propped against a stool is a particularly good cast-iron royal warrant from the Toogood & Sons seed factory, which supplied George VI’s gardeners. And perched on the same rug is a children’s Orkney chair, c1930

Way, way back – in the days before Instagram, before Pinterest, before WoI even – there was a shop on Kensington Church Street, west London, that sold decorative antiques. If you wanted the best of English folk art, naive paintings, country-house furniture erring towards the peculiar, or simply a blush-pink Sunderland lustre jug; if, like Lucian Freud, you were inclined to sit and chat a while with the shop’s owner over madeleines and lapsang souchong in the little, lino-floored back kitchen… then the Lacquer Chest is where you came. It was also where, if you had any sense, you kept on coming.

Still owned by 95-year-old Gretchen Andersen, the business has stood unaffected by the vagaries of fashion for 70 years, outliving the hordes of junk shops, antique emporiums and lifestyle brands that have come and gone. Right from the beginning, the Lacquer Chest was a family affair, set up by Gretchen’s mother-in-law, Esme Andersen, in the early 1950s. Esme’s son, Vivian, was a civil engineer at Arup, and Gretchen, his wife, a primary-school teacher who spent her Saturdays in the celebrated antique pottery shop Sewell, learning about ceramics and porcelain. Gretchen and Viv took on the Lacquer Chest as a high-risk venture. It was 1957, they had £300 between them and precisely zero experience in running a business.

The Nautical Room offers up poetic flotsam and jetsam, such as fishing nets, a 1930s buoy and a fine collection of ropes coiled in a glass jar. The little wooden boat on the wall is a Greek taverna sign picked up on travels. The WC is a reminder of Viv’s upcycling skills. According to his obituarist Spencer Swaffer, he turned wooden loo seats into mirrors and verdigris ballcocks into pawnbroker’s signs

Quitting their respective careers, they pledged that if, by some miracle, they made a profit in their first year of trading, they would press on with the shop. They did. And they carried on with it for the rest of their lives. In Britain, the 1950s was the age of big house clearances. During the war, vast collections of furniture, china, art and oddities were put into storage. Many owners died or never returned for their possessions; warehouses were bulging with pieces that hadn’t been claimed and went on to be sold on by the storage companies themselves. Gretchen and Viv went assiduously to auctions, dealers and big yards that split stuff into Victorian, Regency, silver, junk.

The prevailing mood in interiors then was grand and formal: gleaming mahogany, sideboards, oil paintings. But our couple shrugged off the old orthodoxies, dismissed the polite and ‘correct’, and chose only pieces that excited them. ‘Really, it was just this: if we liked something, we would buy it,’ Gretchen recalls. Then, the word ‘antiques’ usually referred to things from before 1830, ‘whereas we preferred the things that other people left behind’ – which were often more domestic items: breadboards, plates, chargers, jugs, samplers, stools, kitchen tables, campaign chests. Viv’s speciality was dioramas, paintings, maritime objects and bits of early furniture. Gretchen, meanwhile, had an impeccable eye for china. She loved buying collections, and Terence Conran – an early fan and supporter of the Lacquer Chest – would swoop in and buy these for himself and for his new venture, the Conran Shop.

A flotilla of children’s yachts graces the Nautical Room. To the far left is a boat with a navy hull that Gretchen’s husband, Vivian, was given as a four-year-old boy growing up in Saint-Tropez. The former merchant seaman and engineer (and sometime synchronised swimming-troupe manager) had a good eye for naval prints, woolworks, sailor’s shell boxes and other maritime ephemera

At the heart of the husband and-wife’s aesthetic was something that felt absolutely new; a freedom, a lack of solemnity and a delight in the decorative and charming that bore scant relation to the perceived importance of an object. By the 1960s, the Lacquer Chest was a cult destination in one of the hottest quarters of London. Kensington Church Street in the 1960s and 1970s was dense with the coolest antique and clothes shops, the hippest hairdressers and restaurants like Maggie Jones, the haunt of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, where you went with your lover/s to eat chicken pie. People from towns up North would buy away-day tickets and come just to walk up and down the street, home of the beautiful, the original and – crucially – the affordable.

It wasn’t long before the Lacquer Chest started attracting artists, writers, actors and students. Alan Bennett first came in 1961 and kept on coming for the next 50 years. David Hockney was a regular. Nancy Lancaster and Paul McCartney were clients and Colefax & Fowler came twice a week from the 1960s to 2010. Min Hogg, founding editor of this magazine, ‘came literally forever’. More recent customers include the actor Eddie Redmayne and TV journalist Emily Maitlis. Robin Birley has decked out his members’ club 5 Hertford Street with pieces from the Lacquer Chest. And for as long as it’s been open, the New York decorators have continued to pitch up.

Over the years, continental flatware, 1920s tea sets and majolica plates have been hired out repeatedly for use in TV shows, movies and cookery books. To the right is a large collection of ornamental glass tazzas traditionally used to display cakes and sweetmeats. Hung over the fireplace is a piece of linen embroidered with the words NOTHING IS SO DREADFUL AS IT SEEMS, a gift to Gretchen by a stylist

As business boomed, a hire department grew in tandem, beginning with the furniture they rented out to Vogue in 1963 for a fashion shoot. The shop began to loan china, silver, shells, baskets and linen to movies such as Gosford Park, various period drama series and for commercials. If something was graphic or colourful, it would often end up in the hiring department. And, in perfect symbiosis, the things that did not hire would, in turn, end up in the shop. There is still no better place to find English and European pottery and porcelain, folk pieces and crafts. You will always find a beautiful jug here, be it a hunting scene or mochaware. You will find watercolours, prints, a French Empire mirror, Staffordshire china. And still the Lacquer Chest is the family business it always was.

A hundred years’ worth of coloured glass is assembled here – Venetian, Swedish, English and French. In the height of summer, when the sun is at its zenith, it acts as a kind of stained-glass window, blessing the room with blazing colours. The actor Carrie Fisher, a regular customer, was particularly fond of visiting this secret spot

Although Vivian died in 2013, Gretchen has kept on buying and coming daily to the shop until December of last year when – aged 94 – it was gently put to her that she might reduce her workload. Now her daughter Emily, granddaughter Nancy and close friend Ewan Ramsay-Wilson are at the helm. It seems – to paraphrase Philip Larkin – that after a near-century of finding, buying, hiring and selling things, what still remains of this is love. As legendary comedian and loyal customer David Sedaris put it: ‘There just isn’t another shop like this anywhere.’ There wasn’t, there isn’t and most likely there never will be again. Here’s to Gretchen Andersen and the Lacquer Chest.

For more information about Lacquer Chest, visit lacquerchest.com

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