Good taste is noted in the furniture you have at home

BarcelonaOn Ramón i Cajal street in Barcelona, right next to Joanic square, Vell Món is an authentic temple of antique furniture. The 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 an artisan who knows their craft talk about a lifelong trade, because the craft is their life.

José María opened the business in 1988 in the Clot neighborhood. He did not have a special calling as an antique furniture restorer, but it caught his attention and he was interested in learning, persevering, and teaming up 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 a few years later and they have formed a truly interesting and profitable tandem of knowledge.

We are given 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 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 very brown and dark varnishes of the past and that shine that antique mahogany so displayed in the wealthy houses and flats of yesteryear. Avoiding kitsch. Does this mean betraying the furniture? No, it just means giving it a facelift, applying stripping and a light 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 a wardrobe art nouveau from the twenties. The prices are more than reasonable considering how beautiful the pieces are. “It must be kept in mind that the antique furniture market has dropped a lot for some years now. For a chest of drawers that could have been worth 3,000 or 4,000 euros before, now you cannot charge more than 500 for it”, explains José María.

“We are not antiquarians,” he specifies. Before, they received many commissions 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, cupboards, coffee tables, etc. You can also bring in a chair's cane seat to be repaired or marvel at an impressive 18th-century polychrome cupboard or a music cabinet to support a gramophone and store vinyl or shellac records.

While observing a display cabinet, José María's explanation is completely logical: “Today, no one would fill this cabinet to the brim with porcelain objects – this used to happen in many homes –, whoever buys it will have another notion of its utility and decorative intention”. On the subject of updating or renovating 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 could be even older, we won't paint it white; it would completely ruin the value and aesthetics of these fabulous pieces”. Good taste is noticeable in the furniture you have at home and in the personality they distill. This learning, at Vell Món, is essential.

And to finish, they show us a particularly unique piece. A 16th-century Gothic cupboard. 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. A thorough cleaning would be more than enough. Vell Món, active since 1988 and in Gràcia since 1998.