The Aging Business

There are four letters Elis Morgan really hates with a vengeance: I, K, E and A.  The Swedish store has turned his world upside down.

Now in his early sixties, Elis was in the aging business even before he set up on his own in the late eighties. When he left Pontllanfriath Comp he went to work for old Mr Sheridan in Cardiff, where he learned the tricks of the antique trade on the job. Nothing dodgy back then. Yes, they cut a few corners, so to speak, but Sheridan’s was a well-respected firm and there was a good margin to be made buying and selling. Genuine restoration: that’s what Elis was taught. Animal glues, hardwood veneers, Fiddes polishes, decorative beading, the odd handle to be replaced by one carefully matched from something else.

Then Mr Sherridan died and without him the business slowly folded. In any case Elis wanted to use the skills he had learned, and rented a small lock-up on Bryn Road, near his home. It was 1987. You could still buy what was called whitewood furniture from catalogues or from some DIY outlets. Plain softwood carcases, crying out for a bit of t.l.c. and woodstain to turn them into something rather more appealing. Elis’s hard work, skill and what was now, a discerning eye, allowed him to pay his way.  It was the same year that IKEA opened its first British store, 160 miles away in Warrington.

While Elis was good at what he did with wood, marketing was not his forte. He didn’t want to misrepresent what he was selling, even though the price of a ‘lovely Victorian chest of drawers’ was so much higher than for the more ordinary household items he was turning out.

But his best friend, Billy Lewis, was chalk to his cheese. Where Elis had learned a craft carefully, skilfully, diligently, Billy was the local wide-boy, all talk no trousers.  ‘There’s nothing wrong in selling repro’, Billy told him. ‘There’s good money to be made.’ And at first, lovingly re-fabricated pieces were sold as repro to people who knew they were getting just that.

Elis, upped his game and had the experience to replicate the look of finer furniture. But his new partner had no feel for the straight and narrow: there was ‘proper money’ to be made at auction for something that had been distressed to fool everyone and to appear to be from a different age.

Elis may not have known what his chum was doing, but if he did, he turned a blind eye to it.

He married Bethan, Billy’s sister (who else?) in 1992: there was enough money around for what was called ‘a flash wedding’. Trouble was, she could see both sides of the business and she didn’t like her brother’s dodgy approach.

‘We’re not starting a family while you’re still messing with him’, she told her amorous new husband most Friday nights…  (1992 by the way was also the year IKEA opened their Gateshead store.)

The Hawkins Brothers in Barry had been among the first to sell properly-described repro, and Elis worked hard to make a go of that with them. It should have worked but Billy was hooked on his passing-off tricks, and a tension grew between the two men, a tension which only got worse when Billy crashed his car and was done for dangerous driving and being uninsured. He needed money, rather a lot of it, and he emptied the business account.

It was the final straw for Elis, and he went back to working on his own.  It was now 2003, incidentally the year IKEA opened in Cardiff.

Custom from the Hawkins Brothers, and others, was irregular but lucrative. Bethan had a good business head; Elis was a skilled craftsman.  But the market was changing. Repro-antiques were longer so popular. This was now the era of self-assembly – cheap and not always very cheerful. What used to be made of solid wood was now made of compressed wood chip sandwiched between two sheets of plastic. Many people didn’t seem to mind: the prices were so low.

Elis still had work but it was a struggle - and then came the crash. At the same time, he noticed a new trend emerging:  what they now call ‘vintage’…

Scroll forward to today. Ironically, Elis has found steady work as a ‘screwdriver for hire’ assembling flat-pack furniture for those who find it too difficult. Often parts are missing, don’t fit or are damaged. It is easy but un-rewarding work for a skilled craftsman and IKEA is a four-letter word in his house.

But he’s also found that with his experience and a good eye, he can find cast-off items and ‘repurpose’ them for today’s young homemakers, who want the look of 20^th Century classics. So he is back in the aging business, now making pieces look younger…