ANY OLD IRON - FINANCIAL REVIEW MAGAZINE
Terry Ingram analyses how recession is not affecting The Country Trader and writes about Geoff Clark’s decoration ideas.
Click to enlarge FINANCIAL REVIEW MAGAZINE
JUNE 2009, Page 036.
Story by: Terry Ingram
The trade now involves ever greater sleuthing skills and discernment in finding fresh and special stock, which is fast becoming the only kind that buyers really want. From his base in Waterloo, The Country Trader’s Geoff Clark, whose slogan is ‘Expect the unexpected’, has a keen eye for this new market. After five years, the shopping complex PYD (named for the corner he occupies on Phillip, Young and Danks Streets) that he developed out of an old printing works proceeds from the sale of commercial property inn Paddington, was complete. In addition to his own 2000 square metres of space, 1,500 square metres has been let to builder and decorator suppliers.
The recession has actually helped insofar as he is better able to buy in France, his main source of supply. His suppliers there have been much readier than previously to cut prices to make a sale. That vital item, champagne riddling racks, have come down to $100 in price to $850. What matters is ‘the look’ says Clark. The man who notoriously piled pyramids of cauliflowers on dishes as decoration at a fair says originality and appearance are as important or more so than age.
Confronted with any object of limited antique value and practical use, the late Ernst Elphinstone, a Paddington antique dealer, used to advise his colleagues to ‘lamp it’ and here the ingenuity of The Country Trader has taken some brilliant turns. Old gramophone horns have been inverted to hanging ceiling lamps and sold as nasturtium lamps because of their shape, the calcified seaweed and coral have been infused with the LED lights. Like coffee tables, lamps are another item with limited antique supply possibilities.
The garden also has proved fertile for Clark with wide varieties of precious watering cans and, usually, several French villages fountains to choose from. An imaginative gardener should be able to easily place a 19th-Century copper riveted boiler for around $9,600 or a rare French street cart with compartments clad in iron – your own café de wheels from around 1890 for $4,700. Auctions or no auctions, Geoff Clark knows that, for him, this is the decorative way of the future for those wanting to avoid the mass market.
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