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The Directory

Eight of the Best Vintage Shops

If you are a regular reader, or even dip in occasionally come to that, you will know that one of my mantras - I don't want to call it a rule but it's the closest I get to insisting - is that every room should have Something New, Something Old, Something Black and Something Gold.
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Eight More Shops You Should Know About

Continuing the occasional series of Good Shops You Need to Know About, is a round-up of eight of my latest discoveries. Rather than add them one at a time to the relevant directories: Vintage , Contemporary, Boutique and Salvage. I have decided to present them here in one post. This means there is a little bit of everything.
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Eight Of The Best Boutique Stores

Next in this mini directory series, we come to the boutique stores, which is a fancy way of saying those shops that sell a mix of vintage and modern, electic and unusual and can't really be defined as any one particular thing. Their personality is usually down to their owners who curate their collections with
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Eight Of The Best Contemporary Shops Part II

So, it turned out that there are just too many really great contemporary design shops in the UK to fit into one post. Here, then are some more. It has been pointed out on this site, and elsewhere, that for those of you living outside the capital, exposure to good design can be hard so
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Eight Of The Best Contemporary Shops Part I

Continuing the occasional mini-series on Good Shops That You Need To Know About, this week, Mad About The House turns its attention to the contemporary store. Obviously, this is just a taster rather than claiming to be an exhaustive list. But if retro and vintage isn't your bag or you like to mix the two
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Eight Of The Best Vintage Shops

As recyling and being eco-aware become ever more fashionable, it has become quite the thing to furnish our houses with what used, rather sniffily, to be called "second-hand furniture". These days, it's positively bragging to admit that you found that shabby-chic chair languishing in a neighbour's skip, or that your wobbly stool used to belong
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Eight Of The Best Salvage and Reclamation Yards

retrouvious one of the top salvage and reclamation yards in the UK
Back in the days when recycling was a dirty word, a few enterprising families started gathering other people’s building scraps and selling them on to like-minded individuals. These days it’s called architectural salvage and everyone’s at it. There's even an annual salvage fair at Knebworth and if you want to find truly original items for
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All The Shops And Sites You Need To Know

zoffany persian tulip wallpaper via madaboutthehouse.com
As a frequent contributor to The Independent's regular 50 Best features, I have been researching and discovering new places to shop for over ten years now. This directory aims to provide you with details of the ones that I think are the best. It will start off alphabetically because that is the easiest way to compile
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