Have you ever wondered why charity shops won’t take electrical goods? It is because they would be breaking the law if they sold them and they did not meet the relevant regulations. This should be warning enough that buying a second-hand light is fraught with danger. Here are five practical reasons why.
If it does not meet CE/UKCA standards, it is illegal and potentially dangerous (click here). As with lights sourced from north America, it is not just a question of “rewiring” (click here).
It may need cleaning and restoring. Cleaning the outside is usually OK, but trying to extract perished cable from inside a hollow stem, for example, is very difficult, as is making or sourcing replica components. So either the work is done badly, or it is costly.
Scams. This is mainly with chandeliers but also with classics from any period. Such items are like pianos: people don’t buy them often enough to acquire the experience to spot a scam, yet they can involve a lot of money—which is why there are so many scams! You may not be buying what you think you are buying. For example, it is very easy to add the one red crystal that signifies a Baccarat to the layman. And there are still rumours of garages full of bits of chandeliers that were rescued from buildings demolished in the second world war from which “antique” chandeliers can be assembled.
Cost. They will usually cost more, particularly when the cost of refurbishment is taken into account.
Choice:
at any one time, there is a far wider choice of new lights than there is of second hand lights
if you have particular requirements (e.g. size, finish), and the luminaire is being made for you, they can often be accommodated
if you want a matching pair (or more) of something, the right quantity may not be available at auction (e.g. 1st Dibs).
But there is also a moral reason why you should think twice before buying second-hand lights. You may or may not agree.
We set up Cameron Peters partly to support the designers and artists who design, and the craftspeople who make, fine lighting. So the money spent should go to them, not into the pockets of middlemen. As specifiers, you have huge influence over many thousands of poundsworth of buying decisions. As I used to say at KLC, you must think hard about the moral implications of how you use that influence.
Here are two examples to show what I mean. Both involve glass from Murano, a huge worry because lack of interest in the finest work (as opposed to imitations made in China) means that this 700-year-old tradition of the most demanding workmanship, and of the highest cultural importance, could die out.
The first was a client on the north side of Hyde Park who had seen a £100,000 chandelier with a dealer in Mayfair. We gave him an alternative: he could buy a mind-blowingly fabulous chandelier (to his specification) for £100,000 from Barovier & Toso (who he could have visited). This would mean that his money would support the extraordinarily gifted craftspeople who would make it, and the unique glass tradition on the island more generally. (He chose to give it to the dealer.)
The second is a very well-known London-based luxury interior design practice who, on principle, if they specify a Murano glass chandelier, would only consider a second-hand one. I’m not sure why—maybe because something “vintage” is intrinsically better? But that does not make sense is this context—it just denies the remaining glass masters (the maestri, the gaffers) the work and the income. The techniques they use are exactly the same as their predecessors used, going back centuries, as is the work in wood of Leone Cei in Florence (click here) (everything you see below is made by them):
So I’m not saying that you should never buy a vintage light—just that you must take care (I’ve told you what to look for), and that you must be mindful of the implications. After all, we love investigating the vintage lighting in the showrooms around the rue des Beaux Arts in Paris! I’ve never forgotten a stunning, one-off €250,000 rock crystal chandelier that had come from a church in the south of France that needed the money to repair its roof. And if you want some of the fabulous work by designers such as Gaetano Sciolari or Max Ingrand, you've little choice but to buy vintage.
In particular, there should be no problem if you are buying from serous restorers of chandeliers and historic lighting, such as Wilkinson (click here), gloriously located in Kent:
or Woka in Vienna (click here). I took this photo in Woka's workshop...
...and this one in their showrooms on Singerstraße:
