Not everything in this shop is midcentury. Alongside our atomic-age furniture, we also source genuine antiques and traditional South African furniture — a completely different collecting tradition, with its own history, materials, and craftsmanship, going back centuries before the 1950s optimism that defines the rest of this shop.
Old Cape Furniture
Cape furniture traces back to the earliest Dutch, and later French and English, settlement at the Cape from the 17th century onward. Cabinetmakers worked in indigenous timbers — principally stinkwood and yellowwood — combined with imported woods, producing armoires, kists, chairs, and tables that reinterpreted European forms in a distinctly Cape idiom.
The tradition spans a real range: wealthy, urban Cape Town households commissioned elaborate, carved, ornamented pieces as genuine status symbols, while rural farm households used plainer, more functional versions of the same forms, built for daily use rather than display. It's this plainer end of the Cape tradition — honest proportions, minimal ornament, built to work — that shares real DNA with the midcentury pieces elsewhere in this shop, even though the two traditions are centuries apart.
Old Transvaal Furniture
A very different tradition further north and later in time. Following the Great Trek of the 1830s and 40s, Voortrekker families settled the interior and formed the Boer republics, including the old Transvaal. Furniture here was made by pioneers, not trained cabinetmakers — functional, transportable, and built from whatever local timber was on hand, commonly kiaat, boekenhout, and tambotie.
This is where the connection to midcentury design is most direct. Pioneer furniture wasn't stripped down as a style choice — it was stripped down out of necessity, with no ornament that didn't serve a purpose. That same instinct, form following function, is exactly what defines the best midcentury design decades later. Two very different centuries arriving at a similar honesty.
Antiques
Beyond furniture, we also come across smaller genuine antiques in the course of sourcing — items with real age and history that don't fit neatly into either category above, but are worth a home regardless.
As with everything else we sell, every piece in this section is cleaned and polished by hand, or fully restored where real work was needed — and we'll always tell you which.