Restore or Replace?
5 August 2021
Throw-away culture is creating a problem for the environment - is looking after existing furniture (rather than heading to IKEA) the not-so-new eco answer?
Joe Lloyd
Joe Lloyd is a journalist who writes about architecture and visual art for The Culture Trip, Elephant, and The Economist's 1843 magazine, among others.
Restoring picture frames.
Image courtesy of Hatfields.
We live in a throw-away society, from fast fashion to food waste. Furniture is no exception. Replacement has trumped retention. The UK government estimates that 10 million items are thrown away each year. And a 2015 report by the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) puts Britain's annual furniture wastage at 150,000 tonnes.
“We have become,” says Richard Lloyd, “into disposables. Buy it one minute, throw it away the next.” Lloyd is workshop foreman at Hatfields Restoration, where he has worked for 16 years. Hatfields was established in 1834 by the bronze and ormolu manufacturer John Ayres Hatfield. Based in Stockwell, south London, it is now a leading antique restoration company.
Restoring items dating as far back as the 1500s, Hatfields stands in marked contrast to the disposable economy. It has a broad purview, encompassing woodwork, stonework, French polishing, gilding, lacquerwork and painted furniture; clients have included the Louvre, the Frick Collection and Buckingham Palace. “If it’s antique,” says Lloyd, “we tend to do it.” The day I spoke to him, Lloyd was working on the picture frame for a portrait of Oliver Cromwell.
Carving and turning.
Image courtesy of Hatfields.
The antiques trade is currently at a low ebb. “How Low,” read one 2018 New York Times headline, “Will Market for Antiques Actually Go?” Beyond a circle of specialist collectors, pre-modernist furniture has come to suffer from a fusty image. A vogue for minimalism continues, chiming with smaller living spaces in cities and an uptick in short-term occupancy. Consequently, prices of many items have plummeted: “You used to pay up to £3,000 for a table leaf,” Lloyd explains, “whereas now you’d be lucky to get £300.”
Hope for the industry comes from a surprising quarter. In 2019, auction aggregator Barnebys noticed an increasing number of young buyers seeking out older furniture. As an environmentally-conscious generation enters the market, antiques have become an unexpected beacon of reuse and recycling. “I’m not saying,” says Lloyd, “that our business is the correct way to use materials. But at least we make the most of it and enjoy the actual quality of what is there, rather than throwing it away.”
This rejection of a throw-away culture is just one of the ways in which antiques have proven an environmentally conscious option. They also resist global warming. New furniture can contribute harmful emissions at numerous stages: in design, harvesting materials, manufacture, treating, shipping, packaging. Even if restored, antiques create far fewer emissions. According to the International Antiques and Collectors Fairs (IACF), a mass-produced chest of drawers item has a carbon footprint 16 times higher than an antique equivalent.
Gilding.
Image courtesy of Hatfields.
Using antiques forestalls deforestation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that about 10 million hectares of woodland is destroyed each year. Throughout his career, Lloyd has seen entire populations of trees vanish due to overuse. “The most beautiful mahoganies,” he says, “have been ruined, so that there is barely any left in the world.”
The furniture industry is a major suspect. Swedish flatpack giant Ikea is alone responsible for 1 percent of all timber felled. And while there are a growing number of manufacturers committed to using sustainable materials and processes, they still represent only a fraction of the market. Restoration sometimes requires additional material, but far less than that used to produce new items. Hatfields uses its own pre-existing stock of period timber, augmented over time by fortuitous finds, including fine items left out on the street by unsympathetic owners.
Hand-crafted antique items often possess greater longevity than their mass-produced descendants. Much historic furniture is made of wood that has been rested for several decades, allowing natural movement or splitting to occur before the furniture-making process begins. The same is not true today. Engineered wood products such as MDF — a mixture of wood dust, scrap and formaldehyde resin — have even shorter lifespans.
Marquetry and inlay.
Image courtesy of Hatfields.
Some contemporary materials are highly flammable. Others, including formaldehyde, have been reported as causing allergic reactions and cancer, while some modern finishes have been found to emit toxic chemicals. They also do little to improve the lifespan of wood. “Modern glues,” says Lloyd, “are so cruel to furniture. And modern finishes tend to be a hard finish, in that it seals wood in like a plastic coat. It does tend to be that the older the finish, the more sympathetic it is towards the wood.”
Future-proof, waste-free and low in emissions: the environmental case for antiques is irrefutable. But it is not the only argument to restore rather than replace. Antiques can tell stories. Lloyd once restored a table owned by Scone Palace in Scotland, which had been taken from Versailles during the 1789 Revolution. “When we removed it to our workshop,” he recounts, “we heard that the French government was going to kidnap it. So we had to guard it night and day.” Suffused with history but sustainable and long-lasting, antiques might be furniture’s future.
Hatfields Restoration is based in South London, www.hatfieldsrestoration.com, Instagram: @hatfieldsrestoration.
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