Vintage View: Industrial items

AS an aesthetic trend, industrial styling is certainly working its shift.

Understated, interesting, offering unique, proletariat honesty in the face of the boring, everyday thing, it’s easy to see why these survivors are surviving still.

Before the commercial makers perked up to the high street possibilities, collectors and decorators bought straight from the salvage yard and factory floor.

Schools, hospitals, ships, and a myriad of businesses shed decades of disparate stuff in rolling upgrades that created what can be loosely categorised as industrial vintage today. Some items will need re-training to replace large rivets, for example, that might snag soft furnishings and flesh, while others will re-deploy easily straight into off-the-clock surroundings. Included in popular chic commercials are trolleys, shelving, lockers, lighting and various forms of chairs and machinists’ stools.

Utility shelving in metal and wood might not immediately grab your eye, but juxtapose their crude lines with sophisticated objects and sleek surfaces, and they could prove handsome. Dinged paintwork, the odd bang, even some stabilised rusting is all desirable for these useful workers. Be highly aware of any flaking paint (it may carry lead inclusions) and dangerously sharp edges. We’re not wearing overalls after all, so structural and surface soundness is a must. High shelving units should be fastened to the wall. Lockers are useful as the day they were made, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Even the standard upright coffins with their ventilating fins can be shelved internally to suit as pantry cupboards, coat closets, utility storage and more. Stripped of their original oil based paint, mid-century examples with impressed decoration are now highly valued.

Check for serious bends in the door executed during keyless entries and keep in mind the nerve-mincing ‘clang’ of the shallow tinny door. Industrial seating required adjustment to the height and activity of the user.

Armless stools were easy to hop on and off to gather tools and materials along the production line and slid easily under the table of a draftsman. Tubular steel frames could last decades, their wooden seats replaced as needed. Used in laboratories and workshops worldwide, look for examples with a formed ply ‘saddle’ seat. Fixed height stools and chairs will cost approximately half the price of their adjustable colleagues with an intact back-rest and heel-ring.

Wall mounted, pendant office lighting- rough, raw, practical without extraneous decoration, industrial lighting has fascinated the everyday buyer more than any other division of industrial vintage. Over-sized industrial lighting worked its way into homes during the 1960s, when visionary loft-livers left the original working pieces in their revamped commercial spaces, in place.

Personally, I have to suppress a pained groan at the proliferation of the metal industrial pendant in every high street shop and design boutique. Braver collectors are looking to stranger forms from Eastern European salvage specialists, including long metal housing hung on chains for strip lighting, and heavy glass prismatic pendants, designed to split and spread illumination.

The communist bloc was regressive in terms of styling and materials, so complete lights and shades in brass, early plastic and white metals from as recently as the 1970’s can read as firmly retro. Patina, original paint (even peeling) and all signs of rough use and wear are part of an original piece, so think it through before stripping or re-chroming. Place a raw lamp in the hands of a RECI electrician for a thorough re-wire and testing. Original style woven cables for hanging and switches are available, but a metal or indeed any light destined for a domestic setting must be made safe. Protective caging over glass shades offer attractive muscle in factory and maritime finds. Bulkhead units with prismatic glass refractors make hearty wall lamps on a staircase or corridor.