Good taste is noted in the furniture you have at home

BarcelonaOn Ramón i Cajal street in Barcelona, right by Joanic square, Vell Món is an authentic temple of antique furniture. Siblings José María and Cristina Ruiz run a furniture restoration and sales business where you can either bring in worm-eaten or unglued furniture to be repaired, restore a table with great sentimental value, or buy a beautiful piece of furniture that has decades (or centuries) of history impregnated in its wood. It is addictive and fascinating to hear a lifelong artisanal trade spoken about by an artisan who knows it, because the craft is their life.

José María opened the business in 1988 in the El Clot neighborhood. He did not have a special vocation for restoring antique furniture, but it caught his attention and he was interested in learning, persevering, and joining forces with the right masters. And above all, practicing a lot, which, as everyone knows, is how these types of professions are learned. His sister Cristina joined him a few years later and they have formed a truly interesting and profitable tandem of knowledge.

They give us a masterclass on what it means to restore a piece of furniture, on what is worth doing to it and what is not, on what should never be done, and on what the new times imply. The latter is especially relevant: today, an antique piece of furniture, in order to sell it and make it attractive to the modern public, must be light, avoiding those brown and dark varnishes of the past and that shine that antique mahogany once displayed so much in the wealthy homes and apartments of the past. Avoiding kitsch. Does this mean betraying the furniture? No, just giving it a facelift, applying a stripping process and a clear varnish to enhance the natural color of the wood.

They show me examples: an Elizabethan console from the mid-19th century that has a modern finish. Also a beautiful vanity from the fifties and an art nouveau wardrobe from the twenties. The prices are more than reasonable considering how beautiful the pieces are. “One must keep in mind that the antique furniture market has dropped a lot for years now. For a chest of drawers that could once be worth 3,000 or 4,000 euros, now you cannot charge more than 500”, explains José María.

“We are not antique dealers”, he clarifies. They used to receive many orders from antique dealers and auction houses. Now everything has changed. The market has accelerated and this kind of care for the product has been largely lost.

Shop and workshop

The particularity of Vell Món is its duality between shop and workshop. Many restoration businesses –of furniture or whatever else– are premises closed to the public that struggle to inject notoriety and relevance beyond those who already know them. At Vell Món we can find chairs (and all kinds of seats), mirrors, floor and ceiling lamps, chests of drawers, desks, wardrobes, coffee tables, etc. You can also take your chair cane to be repaired or marvel at an impressive 18th-century polychrome wardrobe or a music cabinet to hold a gramophone and store vinyl or shellac records.

While observing a display cabinet, José María's explanation is completely logical: “Today nobody would fill this cabinet to the brim with porcelain objects –before that happened in many homes–, whoever buys it will have a different notion of its utility and decorative intention”. On the subject of updating or modernizing furniture, the two brothers have some red lines they would not cross: “If someone brings us a 19th-century sewing box or a small chest that may be even older, we will not paint it white, it would completely ruin the value and aesthetics of fabulous pieces”. Good taste is noticeable in the furniture you have at home and in the personality they exude. This learning, at Vell Món, is essential.

And to finish, they show us a particularly unique piece. A 16th-century Gothic wardrobe. All the iron elements such as the hinges or the lock are 100% original. Its owner was not aware of this very old dating and wondered if it was worth updating it and leaving it in a lighter color. They convinced her that it was not appropriate. An exhaustive cleaning would be more than enough. Vell Món, active since 1988 and in Gràcia since 1998.