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Two For One
Now here’s an interesting story (well, we hope you find it so!)
We were looking back into the archives at lights from the Deco era, so around the 1930s and specifically the French Street Light. Jesse recounted the salvage story of the original design, which we now reproduce as part of our regular built-to-last range.
Back in the early noughties Trainspotters were contacted by one of their European salvage specialists who had been lucky enough to visit a small city on the France-Belgium border called Tourcoing and save a few hundred of their street lights.
Some of the lights had been pole mounted for a classic street light application while others were wall mounted on brackets, hanging overhead on the fronts and corners of buildings. We were given one of these beautiful cast iron brackets complete with deco detailing which we still have today*
Anyway, we bought the whole batch, which at the time were in a beautiful natural dirty-green verdigris condition that we simply beeswaxed and sold on. A few of the original lights were in too bad a condition to sell as-is so we sent them out to our polishers to see how well we could bring them up.
We were very lucky in that they came out with a wonderful mirror finish. As the original verdigris would have been a struggle to emulate well, we decided to stick with the polished mirror effect and thus the French Street Light was born.
The additional bronze and black finishes you’ll find in our current stock came about because of our customers – we worked on a few large hospitality projects where we were asked to recreate the lights to match other interior finishes; and the black and the bronze were the ones that stuck.
But it doesn’t actually stop there, we need to rewind back to that very first delivery of street lights from Tourcoing…
When the lights arrived at Libby’s Drive, to our pleasant surprise inside, we found the most beautiful reflectors albeit with a little wear and tear to their surface but nonetheless definitely worth restoring in their own right. They were incredibly decorative with beautiful moulding and an aged and peeling mirrored coating that we could salvage and rework as a stand-alone design – and this is how the Jellymould Light came about.
At the time, we used to take each reflector and with a Heath Robinson pillar drill set-up, drill the top of the reflector so we could add a pattress for resale as a pendant light. Back then we took a hit on about 30% of what we had – sadly with that sort of adaptation, there were quite a few breakages!
Since then, we have lovingly redesigned the whole reflector, had the mould produced and now manufacture these as part of our standard lighting range, in a similar fashion to the French Street Light, they too come in three separate finishes – antiqued (very much like the original reflector), frosted and clear.
One of our largest projects of French Street Lights was for the vast and exclusive Riveredge Farm equine facility in Chesapeake, Maryland, USA where the original style wall brackets were used to hang the streetlight outside each stable; alongside antique holophane lamps in the dressage areas, vitreous enamel factory shades for anterior buildings and so on.
*and are currently working on a reproduction bracket, taking the French Street Light full circle to offer it as a wall light as well as a pendant.
The Backstory Over the years we’ve handled some incredible vintage glass lighting. From decorative Holophane pendants salvaged from Victorian churches to industrial explosion-proof beasts rescued from factories in Eastern Europe. Along the way we’ve developed a particular penchant for hand-blown glass. And so over recent years we’ve been building a range of hand blown lights, …
Two For One
Now here’s an interesting story (well, we hope you find it so!)
We were looking back into the archives at lights from the Deco era, so around the 1930s and specifically the French Street Light. Jesse recounted the salvage story of the original design, which we now reproduce as part of our regular built-to-last range.
Back in the early noughties Trainspotters were contacted by one of their European salvage specialists who had been lucky enough to visit a small city on the France-Belgium border called Tourcoing and save a few hundred of their street lights.
Some of the lights had been pole mounted for a classic street light application while others were wall mounted on brackets, hanging overhead on the fronts and corners of buildings. We were given one of these beautiful cast iron brackets complete with deco detailing which we still have today*
Anyway, we bought the whole batch, which at the time were in a beautiful natural dirty-green verdigris condition that we simply beeswaxed and sold on. A few of the original lights were in too bad a condition to sell as-is so we sent them out to our polishers to see how well we could bring them up.
We were very lucky in that they came out with a wonderful mirror finish. As the original verdigris would have been a struggle to emulate well, we decided to stick with the polished mirror effect and thus the French Street Light was born.
The additional bronze and black finishes you’ll find in our current stock came about because of our customers – we worked on a few large hospitality projects where we were asked to recreate the lights to match other interior finishes; and the black and the bronze were the ones that stuck.
But it doesn’t actually stop there, we need to rewind back to that very first delivery of street lights from Tourcoing…
When the lights arrived at Libby’s Drive, to our pleasant surprise inside, we found the most beautiful reflectors albeit with a little wear and tear to their surface but nonetheless definitely worth restoring in their own right. They were incredibly decorative with beautiful moulding and an aged and peeling mirrored coating that we could salvage and rework as a stand-alone design – and this is how the Jellymould Light came about.
At the time, we used to take each reflector and with a Heath Robinson pillar drill set-up, drill the top of the reflector so we could add a pattress for resale as a pendant light. Back then we took a hit on about 30% of what we had – sadly with that sort of adaptation, there were quite a few breakages!
Since then, we have lovingly redesigned the whole reflector, had the mould produced and now manufacture these as part of our standard lighting range, in a similar fashion to the French Street Light, they too come in three separate finishes – antiqued (very much like the original reflector), frosted and clear.
One of our largest projects of French Street Lights was for the vast and exclusive Riveredge Farm equine facility in Chesapeake, Maryland, USA where the original style wall brackets were used to hang the streetlight outside each stable; alongside antique holophane lamps in the dressage areas, vitreous enamel factory shades for anterior buildings and so on.
*and are currently working on a reproduction bracket, taking the French Street Light full circle to offer it as a wall light as well as a pendant.
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The Backstory Over the years we’ve handled some incredible vintage glass lighting. From decorative Holophane pendants salvaged from Victorian churches to industrial explosion-proof beasts rescued from factories in Eastern Europe. Along the way we’ve developed a particular penchant for hand-blown glass. And so over recent years we’ve been building a range of hand blown lights, …