If you’re a fan of Victorian interior design, you’re in luck because there are a plethora of places both on and offline to source bargain furniture, decor, furnishing, kitchenware and more. From antique stockists to eBay and car boot sales, we’ve rounded up all the best places you can score Victorian accessories for the home, both online and from expert stockists across the UK.
Places online you can find Victorian accessories for the home
The resources online for sourcing great vintage homeware are truly endless, so we’ve rounded up four great places to find both bargains and one-of-a-kind Victorian finds.
EBAY
It shouldn’t come as news that eBay is a great place for sourcing antiques. From furniture and decorative arts, carpets and rugs to metalware, you can find almost anything on eBay. To source specifically Victorian items you have a few options: firstly, when shopping on the Antiques category, on the left-hand side menu, you can select the ‘Period & Style’ filter, and within that, shop by the time period between 1880-1899.
Or, if you’re looking for ‘Victorian furniture‘ for example, you can select the Style & Period filter on the left side menu as ‘Victorian’, and you can apply this filter to other categories you’re looking for, for example Victorian Decorative Arts.
ETSY
If you’ve never shopped on Etsy before, you’re in for a treat! Designed to be a platform where artistic and independent producers can sell their creations, you can also find great vintage clothes, accessories, art and homeware on the site. Happily enough, Etsy have made sourcing Victorian items easy peasy thanks to an easy-to-find ‘Victorian’ style filter within their Home & Living category. But beware: not everything you see is authentically Victorian; some items have just been “tagged” to show up across a lot of categories, so do read the descriptions well, inspect the pictures and contact the seller if you have questions about authenticity.
FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE
Shopping on Facebook? Yep! Launched in 2016 as a place for local communities to buy and sell to each other, Facebook Marketplace has a great selection of very well-priced homeware, from sofas to framed prints, and even mantelpieces! So, how does it work? Browse the seemingly-never ending listings, and when you see what you like at a price you like, simply contact the seller and negotiate the selling price and/or delivery costs.
LOVE ANTIQUES
A comprehensive source for shopping all things antiques, Love Antiques describes itself as “a place to see thousands of ‘genuine antiques from trusted dealers’” and “prides itself on offering some of the best antiques and decorative items on the internet”. Sounds great, right? Their easy-to-use website currently has over 7,000 items in the Victorian category, so you’re bound to find something to love – albeit at a slightly higher cost. Love Antiques isn’t quite as cheap as the sites listed above, but who can put a price on authenticity?
Places offline you can find Victorian accessories for the home
There are a number of Victorian homeware stockists based in the UK for furniture, paint, lighting and stained glass.
DOORS
PERIOD PAINT COLOUR
GATES AND RAILINGS
DOOR FURNITURE
LIGHTING
FAN LIGHTS
STAINED GLASS
Norfolk’s Aladdin’s cave of Victorian treasures
Mongers Architectural Salvage of Hingham in Norfolk is a veritable Aladdin’s cave for fans of the unusual, beautiful and quirky. Owner Sam Coster arrived in Hingham via the Royal Opera House in London, where he worked as a theatrical designer and scenic artist painting backdrops. Sam and his late wife Trudie started a reclamation business in Kilburn in the mid 1990s, relocated to Camden Town, and then moved to the historic Georgian market square of Hingham in 1997. It was said that they were seduced by the spacious yard, shop space and the 15th century timber-framed cottage next door, which they set about restoring. Slowly.
In the shop are countless sets of ornate taps, painted sanitary ware, fireplaces and door furniture. Outside, baths of all shades crowd together, garden ornaments take their place next to a pond built by Sam and, in the newly-expanded showroom, stunning refurbished enamel baths and bathroom suites in standard white and an array of pastel art deco shades are on display.
Restoring sanitary ware to its former glory is a large part of the business and led the producers of Channel 4’s Grand Designs to Hingham, where the firm supplied a selection of coloured 1930s bathroom fittings to a couple building an eco-house in London.
“It was great fun to take part and of course a business like ours really is as green as they get. Finding these pieces that have been cast out from one home or business a new home means they have a new lease of life,” said Sam. “Everything we sell has its own story and sometimes those stories are quite fantastic: I had a summerhouse once in which it was said that Nik Cohn wrote Saturday Night Fever and we had a toilet used by Betty Grable at the Palace Theatre in London. I can get just as excited when I find a fire surround with a name scribbled on the back in pencil, though – it’s like a message from the past.”
Sam explained that the nature of the salvage business was changing as more people clamoured for reclaimed items in their homes and businesses. “Salvage has been fairly big since the 1970s, but it’s no longer as easy – or as cheap – to get hold of the things which there used to be an abundance of. It used to be the cheap option to use salvage to refurbish your house, but now you may need deeper pockets,” he said.
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