Decorating your home in a vintage style
One of the best things about time passing is that we get to throw away the fads and faux pas and keep all the best things about the time for future use. In twenty years’ time, will skinny jeans still be ‘the thing’ to wear? If flares are anything to go by there will certainly be a few people wearing them, and wearing them proudly. And just like fashion, you can decorate your home with some of the best things from the decades gone by.
Who would have thought that the old rotary phones would now be a sought after item? There are even teenagers now who would have never seen a rotary phone, much like there being few people left who had to deal with a candlestick telephone. Items like old phones can be found everywhere from car boot sales to the top auction houses, so it’s worth searching for some bargains or rare pieces.
Another way to give your home that vintage feel is with old style photographs. There’s been a renaissance of photographers using a process known as “Collodion imaging” to create traditional style photographs, photographs reminiscent of the turn of the 20th Century. It’s a simple but challenging process, one that replaced the daguerreotype method. A glass sheet is coated in chemicals in a dark room, then taken to an old style view camera and exposed before being smuggled in darkness back to the dark room and developed. And all of this has to be done within 15 minutes before the chemical coating on the glass negative dries. It results in distinctive images that many people are looking for as a special keepsake.
What’s great about this type of image is that not only are you getting a fantastically vintage, decorative piece but genuine art as well. And every genuine artwork deserves a quality vintage photo frame to house it. And where you get both art and style with a vintage printed collodion image, a good frame provides multiple benefits as well: protection and beauty. Frames are important, especially to a treasured image such as a wet collodion print. A good frame will protect the image against environmental and atmospheric damage that can help a well printed last over a century, much like the original collodion prints.
If collodion prints aren’t your thing, what about a vintage era poster. There are hugely evocative films from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, and their posters are often seen used to great effect in vintage shops, and bars and restaurants going for that years gone by style. You just have to be careful that you don’t come across like a teenager with posters on her wall, and here again a frame will change the poster from sellotape and damaged walls to something of true vintage looks, making your walls a feature to be proud of.