d'Arty & Pike is born

Well it's a brave new world and we are in it.

d'Arty & Pike is a new and perfectly formed online boutique homewares store, currently on Ebay but our own website is arriving in September.

We love old fashioned vintage home interiors stuff, but also we find we love contemporary design too. So confusing! What we like is a wonderful mixture of the two. Our style is clean and contemporary but with a French vintage twist. Our interiors are fresh, uncluttered and inviting but peppered with wonderful items that catch the eye. We want to share that vision and so here we are d'Arty & Pike.

We have already sold our first lovely item. These gorgeous gold/orange glass espresso cups and saucers that frankly I was sorry to say goodbye to. Are they French or Italian? The manufacturers name was Gondolo and they were just deliciously retro 1960's.

What's next...

Well we have a few other lovely items for sale, currently on Ebay.

First of all, a red enamel stove kettle. As red as a London bus. There are 4 days and a few hours to go on this item but already there are 9 pairs of beady eyes watching it. It is lovely and they are not easy to find.

Next, a Peugeot Freres coffee bean grinder which I reckon has been through the second world war. Coffee is of course far more important in France than tea. These grinders are now quite hard to find and Peugeot the car manufacturer started out making mechanical things for the home. There you go! You start in one place and end up in another.

But just to prove that the French do also drink tea occassionally and very delicately, we've also got for sale some very sweet teacups and saucers, mismatched but nevertheless beautifully in harmony with a gorgeous side plate in peppermint green and gold. There's another option with a side plate in heavenly golden yellow and gold.

However, the wonderful French can't help themselves and before you know it they're making coffee again and drinking it using beautiful coffee sets like this one made by the famous china factory at Sarreguemines Digoin in Burgundy.

And finally, we shoot forward in time to the funky 1970's with this retro leaf platter from Vallauris. This is a small town near Antibes made famous in the 1940's when Picasso decided to turn his artistic hand to ceramics. No this platter was not made by dear old Pablo, but without him Vallauris would have stayed a sleepy village in the Cote d'Azur.

We are aiming to have our online shop up and running by the end of the summer, until then we will be running around sourcing, creating and stocking up on a wonderful variety of vintage objets and contemporary design 'must haves'. Watch this space.