On the ground floor of Owen Pacey’s house in London’sShoreditch, huge chandeliers dangle like dowager’s pendants from the rafters. Marble fireplaces, cool and veined, are propped next to gilded mirrors. This is Pacey’s architectural salvage shop, a twinkling, glinting emporium of architectural salvage sought out by supermodels, rock stars and everyday folk in search of the real deal.
History also spills into his three-storey flat above the shop. Pacey bought the building, on City Road, when it was in a “horrible” condition in 1995 and he has been restoring it ever since. The setting is subdued: plain walls, gauzy curtains, nothing too showy. For Pacey, an East Ender with an ear for a yarn, it’s the artefacts – the carved fireplaces, the swooping Louis XV bedheads, the Murano lights – not the decoration, which bring magic to his home.
In pre-gentrified Shoreditch, once the hub of London’s cabinetry trade, the corner property was a pub before it became offices in the 80s. He spotted the lease was up for grabs by chance. “I’d broken up a fight and ended up being treated at Moorfields Hospital after I was whacked in the face. I was at the bus stop when I noticed the ‘to let’ sign.”
A few decades later, when his landlord arrived in his Bentley, Pacey persuaded him “in my best Oliver Twist voice”, to let him buy the Victorian building.“It was still quirky and affordable around here then. I knew I’d never make anything of myself unless I bought this place.”
Working with interior designers on grand projects has provided ideas for the home he shares with his partner, Rachel O’Hare, a journalist. “I’ve learned that it’s good to think big,” he says, pointing out a magnificent renaissance French fireplace, restored in the workshops below. In the sitting room, the sprawling corner sofa is by British firm Squint; the leather-bound books came from a convent. “The nuns struck a tough deal,” he says. The cascading chandelier on the landing is 1970s, by Italian maker Venini. “I found it in a junk shop.” From here, doors open on to the terrace, which sits over the former pub. Pacey “nurtured” the planting and deep hedges to muffle the noise of traffic, adding vintage furniture so that “it feels like an urban wonderland”. During lockdown he took plants to neighbours and stopped for doorstep chats; “It felt like a way of bringing us together.”
Years of alterations had robbed the interior of most of its original features. “I’ve tackled it in phases. For years the top floor was so damp and smelly that I couldn’t go up there. It’s been an ongoing labour of love.” One of the few remaining original details was the staircase, which he stripped back to its mahogany brilliance. He added bulbous cast-iron fireplaces and removed partition walls to accentuate the scale of the rooms. The floors are salvaged oak boards. For the walls he chose “faded stone colours to complement the fireplaces”. The flat doubles as a showroom, “so the paint had to be washable as we move the furniture around a lot”.
Pacey’s first job was stripping and waxing panelled pine doors for £20 a day on the Hornsey Road, in north London. “I left school at 16, what did I know about anything? I had no idea this world existed. But I fell in love with it. And I’ve been learning ever since. You might think you know it all, but then you find something new.”
His earliest customers included the “gentlemanly” artists Gilbert & George, who were restoring their Queen Anne house in nearby Spitalfields. Madonna once demanded a key to the shop so she could browse in VIP privacy. “I said no.”
The days of rummaging in a skip for overlooked bounty are over, says Pacey, who relies on a network of dealers and deep internet trawls for stock, “but sometimes you have to just get in the van and go out there and find it”. And there are always treasures to be unearthed if you have the intuition. With architectural historian Dan Cruickshank, he once embarked on a quest to find the remnants of the neoclassical Euston Arch. The Victorian structure, the original entrance to the station, was demolished in 1962 and fragments were scattered across the capital. The supersleuths recovered some from a playground in Camden.
On another occasion he found a Roman relief languishing in a junkyard: “The owner thought it was a Georgian copy.” In Paris he spotted a set of carved stone heads in a flea market said to be from Rheims cathedral. “The dealer spun me such a story that it could only be true.” A curator at the British Museum confirmed they were indeed from the cathedral, which had been shelled by the Germans during the First World War. They were promptly sent to auction.
Finding new homes for displaced relics still gives him satisfaction. “I’ve been doing this job all my life. But when I walk into a Georgian manor house and see one of my fireplaces I’ll think, ‘I did that.’ You can’t better that feeling.”
renaissancelondon.com