Salvage & Architectural Antiques

The team at antiques dealership Robert Mills Architectural spent decades salvaging items from closed-down churches, banks, mansions and pubs.

The sale at garden statuary specialist Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) in Billingshurst on March 24 (the day after lockdown) was among the first conducted under new government restrictions on social distancing.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Always popular items, a Georgian lead cistern offered at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) was also rare in being circular. Usually they are rectangular, having stood against a wall connected to downpipes.

In market terms, ecclesiastical gates are not the subject of mass appeal but examples by major 19th century designers certainly had their devotees at two June sales.

A highlight of Suffolk House Antiques’ summer selling exhibition is a pair of 13th or 14th century English gargoyles.

A carving of a deerhound which once adorned a 19th century yacht more than doubled the house record for a figurehead at a Charles Miller auction in west London. The item sold for £52,000 had a royal connection but it was the quality and condition which secured the high price, said Miller.

Although the antiquities market is more stringently regulated than ever before, the possibility of illicit material continues to cause concern for collectors of antiquities. This places a greater financial value on pieces with long watertight provenances.

This cast-metal figure of a young girl with a bird on her arm, below, is offered on a composition base for £325 from English and Continental Antiques.

Pioneer collection of street furniture goes from Parisian flat to the saleroom.

French and foreign bidders flock to white-glove sale of pioneer collection of the city’s heritage

Buyers are spoilt for choice during May and early June when three decorative and salvage fairs will be running in the UK, all in interesting outdoor settings. Here is a short focus on them.