I visit the East coast of the USA annually and have done so since 2005. The trips always take the usual slant of design, architecture, art, garden visiting themes with the added bonus of scouring disused sites for interesting salvage. This time was no different and some friends had told us about this Architectural Salvage yard up the coast of New England in New Bedford Massachusetts.
 
Usually when in the USA I visit antiques centres, they are never small, this being America, nothing ever comes on a small scale. It's not often you get to see a Salvage yard there, especially with items that span the American architectural styles. I was expecting a large warehouse-type of building but perhaps not as big as this. Parking a few planes in this old factory would not have been a problem; the building must have been over 300 metres long, three floors high (it took 3 flights of stairs to get to each floor).
 
In over 20 years of scouring architectural salvage yards in mainland Europe and having visited pretty much all the salvage yards in the UK, I have never ever seen anything so big. It was not just the size of the building which literally made us gawp for a good five minutes before entering, but the quantity and quality of the artefacts within it.
 
One normally expects to see a few fireplaces, twenty to thirty at the most in a large salvage yard. I once visited a Manchester chap who had two thousand fireplaces but that is truly the exception. Here in New England there were literally thousands of any one item and the range was vast. On the ground floor there was an area that measured (and I did measure it) over 100m2 stacked with shelves and containers housing door knobs! An area of at least two hundred metres by thirty metres wide was full of doors stacked against railings, a smaller area (only by a few metres) was replete with porch pillars leaning against each other from every architectural style - I saw early American styles from Georgian to Greek revival, Victorian styles such as Folk and Second Empire to American colonial styles such as Tudor Revival to Beaux Arts and Italian Renaissance. There were over 500 claw foot bathtubs and hundreds of tubs with deco fittings still attached laid out over one side of the whole length of the 1st floor and the other side was packed with what must have been over 1000 radiators. Some of the radiators were particularly beautiful - intricate castings from every era were on show. I wanted to take a few home. Excess luggage would have been rather exorbitant. I kept saying "waow" the whole time as I went from area to area.
 
I loved the Tutti Frutti section as I call it - early twentieth century sinks, toilets and cisterns in every conceivable colour. Not something I would use in any restoration but American do like to restore faithfully and anyone with an old house would definitely find replacements here.
 
Mid-century was very well represented throughout and downstairs houses furniture loosely set up as rooms, different lighting sections, doors, windows, architectural mouldings, flooring and even a Buffalo, to the more industrial salvage such as old bars, railroad signage, train station ticket offices, wall panelling and office desks from the early thirties.

I love embossed tin ceilings in the USA and there they were stashed flat on top of each other on pallets next to the porch columns of which there were, once again, thousands of - the picture does not do the size of the place justice.
 
The great thing about this place is that everything has its place and nothing is stacked on top of other things - segmented into areas, it was a pleasure to visit. I kept thinking that if I worked in the USA this is where I would get most of my salvage for my clients. As one can expect from America, the level of service was exemplary, helpful, smiling and always willing to chat about this and that, I wanted to pitch up tent and stay there. The few hours I spent there were not enough - American really does super size everything and pictures cannot even convey the scale of this site.
 
Françoise Murat
 
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Francoise Murat is a degree qualified Interior Architect and Garden Designer. She runs workshops on Interior Design for period homes and contemporary houses. She also writes for Country Life and Sarah Beeny on interiors and gardens.