Vintage furniture pop-ups bring virtual sellers’ wares to the real world

On the way back from the swimming pool with my children last Sunday, I noticed a huge Belgian Art Deco sideboard with seductively curved sides and solid brass hardware in the window of a tiny shop in a busy east London road. On top, there was a selection of vintage ceramics, and a Swedish mid-century abstract piece hung above it. I went in to marvel at the brass inlay and the inbuilt drinks cabinet, until impatient kids with dripping wet hair dragged me away. That evening, I saw pictures on Instagram of it being heaved into a removal van, off to a new home. 

The store wasn’t a furniture or antique shop, rather a pop-up sale in a community events space, run for 36 hours by Katie Ridges, who operates on Instagram as @vantage.living. Along with someone stopping by for a £1,400 sideboard, that afternoon Ridges sold a 1950s Spanish console and six 1960s Scandinavian teak dining chairs.

Pop-ups are now an increasingly popular way for Instagram antiques resellers to bring their wares to the world. Selfridges recently held a vintage furniture pop-up residency, where 25 sellers (including Ridges) sold 360 items over four weeks. The fashion brand Jigsaw recently hosted 10 sellers across nine stores, also with Ridges, while the kitchen brand Plain English held a pop-up with online antique seller @Relic_interiors in March.

Folie Chambre, a Yorkshire-based interior design and antique sourcing business, will hold an east London pop-up in June and another in New York later this year. The creative agency Demain Design, which promotes second-hand goods, is hosting its second pop-up this year in Paris (key to its success, co-founder Océane Labat jokes, is “a coffee station and homemade cookies”).

Perhaps the most ambitious one comes this month, May 15-18, courtesy of the Hampshire-based vintage emporium Merchant & Found. It is renting the 6,000 sq ft Vinyl Factory space in Soho, central London, for its Vintage Supermarket. Stock will arrive in eight 7.5-tonne lorries to fill the space. The event has been organised with online vintage sellers Vinterior and London Craft Week.

Antiques are very tactile — people want to be able to feel them and to see the quality in real life

Merchant & Found is not — like other Instagram sellers — a small enterprise; it has six warehouses across Hampshire and Wiltshire and supplies designers and hospitality clients, including Sessions Art Club (for which it provided all the chairs). Despite customers being welcome to drop into the warehouse, 95 per cent of its stock is sold online. Founder Paul Middlemiss, who built his career as a buyer for Habitat and the Conran Shop (and is somewhat of a mid-century chair obsessive), says the pop-up will be a chance to show “vintage in volume” to those who don’t want to buy items piecemeal from a small screen.

Shopability — and style — is key to the vintage pop-ups. When Vinterior had a six-month residency in the basement of Selfridges, it had beautifully styled displays ranging from an aubergine-coloured Togo sofa to an onyx marble trinket dish.

The Vintage Supermarket will be styled, courtesy of Betsy Smith, the Conran Shop’s former head of visual merchandising, like an old-fashioned supermarket with aisles. They will be filled with stacks of vintage French glass demijohns, milk bottles and hundreds of chairs (it has more than 10,000 in stock) — as well as handmade “produce” such as crocheted sardines, textile sausages and neon-light cheeses. It will include supermarket trolleys, a checkout, a tannoy, “supermarket sweep” giveaways, panel discussions and masterclasses from some of the makers.

For many, it will be a chance to see vintage pieces in real life, in an unusual setting. Which is exactly what Ambrice Miller, founder of the Suffolk-based @Relic_interiors, found at her pop-up with Plain English. “It’s an absolutely stunning showroom, but I think it worked well for them having my pieces in there because it shows a customer what the kitchens [could] look like,” Miller says. It worked both ways. “Antiques are very tactile — people want to be able to feel them and to see the quality in real life. I think being there in the flesh adds a legitimacy to the transaction.”

There can be financial gains if you can cosy in on someone else’s space — Miller sold about £4,200 worth of stock at the pop-up; a normal weekend of web sales would earn her £3,000-£6,000. But for Middlemiss, renting the space in Soho for three days, plus all the logistics of sourcing and transporting stock, as well as the theatrics he is hoping to perform “is a huge investment” — running well over £100,000. It’s a considered risk, he says, because he wants to inject fun into buying vintage and to revel in the history of craft rather than make money from the event.

It’s the other aspects of having a real shop that are appealing. Middlemiss likes the thought of subtly educating his shoppers in the heritage of the pieces he is displaying. “We are the champions of the forgotten maker,” he says, “so we have planned a display of some of the makers we love, with some of their famous pieces as well as a bit of history and so on.”

For others, the interest comes from the forging of real-world connections. For example, Natalie Tillison, founder of East Yorkshire-based Folie Chambre, has created such a cult following that at a recent London pop-up a client came over from New York especially to see her. “He bought as much as his suitcase could fit in, and the next day, came back for more.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram