If it's not broken....

Unique and second-hand items are intrinsically weaved into the narrative of our dining spaces. They are sustainable in nature as they are already built, they are gathering dust, discarded waiting to be rediscovered and given a new purpose.

When we opened Primeur, our first restaurant 11 years ago in a backstreet of Stoke Newington, we had no money. David and I went cap in hand to all our friends and family and begged for seed money and though many believed in our vision, none had cash to spare. 

Eventually, a generous and influential friend and musician - (there is always a hidden celebrity donor in a good origin story) - started the ball rolling and as soon as he was on board, many followed.

In the end we managed to scrape £135k and this needed to cover everything from build to extraction, licensing, kitchen equipment, identity, website, recruitment, legal work, planning, opening stock etc... there was very little left for furniture and crockery. We made it work scratching in the dirt of auction houses, antique markets in the UK and the continent & finding good people to build stuff that cannot be found anywhere else. 

We designed everything from scratch following the Shakers' practical approach to aesthetics: if it does not serve a purpose, we don't put it in. We got our builders and metal workers to make our long sharing tables & central legs, build the stairs and railings, we wanted everything to be built for the space, nothing mass produced.

A lot of people still ask us where we "purchased" our imposing steel pendent light over the stairs at Primeur and they are always both surprised and pained to hear that it was made by the last metal spinners in Tottenham industrial estate, who used to make the nose cones of the Spitfires during World War II. 

Their workshop was a treasure trove of wooden chucks - (the mould they fashion to spin the metal sheets onto) - and thousands of metal shapes messily arranged on shelves amongst steel shavings and heavy machinery under long industrial strip lights. These guys closed their doors for the last time a year after Primeur was born due to competition from the enormous factories in the East.

Then we needed chairs and plates and we headed out to Kempton and Ardingly at 4am as often as we could to spend the remaining cash we had.The plates came from an English woman called Tina Bones who had relocated to France and came back to the UK twice a month with gorgeous plates she herself bought from French rural fairs. She sold them for 50p each, we bought hundreds as our commercial dishwasher greedily ruined them all one by one. Tina like many other European traders, has stopped coming to the UK since Brexit, as it is just too expensive to make the trip now, a fact that has impoverished the range of goods to be found across the UK's fairs and car boot sales today.

The chairs at Primeur were also bought from an auction house near Birmingham. Legend has it that back in the 1990's the Savoy hotel had a rodent infestation and the hotel got rid of all the soft furnishings at auction. Chairs from one of the dining rooms were bought by a big Indian restaurant in the Midlands which following bankruptcy, sold them on to us via an auction house for £35 each. They now cost £900 to repair and recover!

The list of stories relating to bits and pieces you can find in all our restaurants goes on and on and our love for finding beautiful and unusual things for the next projects means we have a large store room in North London, filled with objects, ready to be brought to life by us and now by you as we are putting them up for sale slowly on our shop.

In our unsustainable single use modern world of wanting the newest and latest thing, a fantastic trail of discarded riches from days gone by compels us to scratch in the dirt, meet the people who whisper their legends and myths, who still believe cash is king and point with a furtive finger at an invisible map while muttering "Here there be Monsters and the Treasures you seek"... 

Finally with the £54 left in the bank on the day Primeur opened on May 14th 2014 David and I almost bought a pair of framed stuffed Hares from a car boot, but we thought better of it and had two Welsh rarebits & two pints of Guinness at St.John instead. Then we were really broke.

Happy Hunting!

Jolene

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