Anthony Broad’s new furniture shop and art gallery, Claremont, has spent its first few weeks battling against the noise of pneumatic drills as workmen renew the pavements in London Road near the Stag theatre. “The first three weeks here were hectic, then they closed the road off and the noise and dust slowed things down quite noticeably. A shop like this depends on people driving past and seeing something in the window and coming back.”
Anthony is a longtime Sevenoaks resident who has a warehouse in Wrotham and used to own an antiques shop in Tunbridge Wells. “For the last three years I have sold wholesale only to dealers and designers. The main reason I have opened a shop is to do the art as well. You can’t do that from a barn in the country.”
So why did he choose Sevenoaks, where the rents are higher, rather than going back to Tunbridge Wells? “I live here and I’ve seen the way the town has steadily improved in terms of the shops over the past few years. I thought it would be nice to try it here.”
He acknowledges that he is trying to buck the nationwide trend of antiques shops closing, but explains that what he is offering is something rather different. “While the furniture is antique, it is often adapted in a modern way. Many of the pieces are repainted and adapted to make them more functional in a 21st century home.”
Anthony sources old furniture – tables, dressers and cupboards – not just in the UK and France but from as far away as Russia and Slovakia and adapts it. “I do a lot of these console tables which I cut back to a depth of about seventeen inches. People nowadays want the look of that kind of table but they don’t want it to take up so much space in a room.”
He acknowledges that old furniture seems to be out of fashion among the under-40s, but is optimistic that the pendulum will swing back. “It’s quite easy to envisage a time when I couldn’t sell a table with turned legs. It had to be straight legs. Now some of my American customers are saying, we want turned legs. It all comes around.” So the tables on which Slovakian peasants ate their dumplings find a new lease of life as coffee tables in Sevenoaks. “It’s the ultimate in recycling. We should all be thinking as greenly as possible, and you can’t do better than to recycle furniture.”
Interestingly, Anthony has dropped the word ‘antiques’ altogether from his shopfront. “In the current market people may be put off by the word antique because they think it’s passé, fuddy-duddy, whatever. If you’re selling antique stuff which has a fresh contemporary look, it can actually represent very good value for money, a far superior product to what you’ll find at IKEA or anywhere else.” Anthony’s other passion is for 20th century art, and he plans regular exhibitions of paintings, beginning with the Bristol artist Barrington Tabb. “I’ll be doing around six exhibitions a year.”
