Back to Beijing

Off to China again in a few days for the sourcing trip that never happened a few months ago due to the infamous Icelandic volcano! It’s been a long time since I was last out there, so it will be good to catch up with everybody again. I will start with five days in Beijing, which I will use to select the next collection of Chinese antique furniture as well as smaller accessories to ship with them in the next month or two.

First stop will be the main antique restoration workshop that we deal with, a purpose built complex on the outskirts of the city. I have dealt with this workshop now for around five years and the quality of the pieces they are able to source and their skill in restoring them are consistently high. They usually have some beautiful pieces from western China – Qingha, Gansu and Inner Mongolia, as well as furniture from Shanxi and Beijing which is more commonly available. As I did for the last container of antiques, it is possible to choose from photographs as I know that the quality will be good, but nothing beats seeing these wonderful pieces for real to appreciate the proportions, detail and finish.

This time around I also plan to visit a couple of antique workshops that I have not been to before. I’m confident that their furniture will again be towards the higher end of the market and that they will have some slightly different pieces available so that we can offer some further variety in our antique collection. As usual I am going out to China with a list of specific requirements from several customers for antiques, so I’m hopeful that I will be able to come up with a few options through the various suppliers that I will visit. If you are reading this and are looking for something specific then now is the time to get in touch and I’ll do my best to source this for you in the next couple of weeks!

After Beijing it’s over to Shanghai to catch up with the workshop where our main Chinese Classical furniture range is produced. We’ve been busy creating one or two new pieces to add to this range recently, so I’m looking forward to seeing these before our next shipment of reproduction furniture leaves in mid September. These pieces and the new pieces in our Contemporary Asian furniture range will be on the website in the next few weeks so more to follow on that later.

I also plan to update the blog while I’m over in China with details of any particularly nice pieces that I come across for our antique container, so check the blog out over the next couple of weeks.