Category Archives:
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21 August 2017
Obscure Witness to a Titanic Disaster.
LASSCO has acquired a set of cast iron door cases from the original headquarters of the White Star Line – owner and operator of RMS Titanic. Built in 1903-1906 by the firm of H. Tanner Jr, Oceanic House has significance and setting that belies its present anonymity at the confluence of Cockspur Street and Pall Mall...
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9 May 2017
Cabinets of Wonder
LASSCO is encouraged to see the inclusion of a modest geological museum with many of its contemporaneous Edwardian features intact included in a short list for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year prize. Though modest in scale the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham is being pitted against some of the nation’s great cultural institutions...
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12 April 2017
A Disposition To Preserve, An Ability To Improve
A recent LASSCO supplied restoration of a C17th townhouse in the West End of London demonstrates that integrity of materials combined with an eye to improvement are the key ingredients in the enhancement and restoration of ancient buildings. Much like a piece of antique furniture, once wooden floors reach a certain age they all have an inherent...
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29 March 2017
Take Back Control
LASSCO’s in house carpenter creates one-off items of furniture combining integrity of materials with admirable utility. We encourage our customers to ponder what they can do themselves with our wealth of salvaged materials. With so much remarkable and historical salvage dispersed across our three sites, we at LASSCO are often sorely tempted to take up and...
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1 February 2017
“No contentment without the beautiful”
LASSCO has acquired a gross of Afghan saddle bag Soumaks and Kilim textiles and now invites our customers to put them to creative and decorative use. In Your Garden “Each of the flowers in your garden is brighter than a lamp; In your garden a black crow becomes like a phoenix for me. For Rahman...
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5 December 2016
‘Dear God, What A Place’
LASSCO has acquired the complete furniture and fittings of the ill-fated modern bistro ‘Le Chabanais’, lately showered with ordure in the pages of The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. It is a commonly held misapprehension that Henry VIII naval flagship, the Mary Rose, sank on her maiden voyage. The fate of the barque, packed to...
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1 November 2016
High Industrial Swagger On The Factory Floor.
LASSCO has come into posession of a large quantity of reclaimed Victorian maple strip flooring from the Ogden’s tobacco factory in Liverpool. Ogden’s Imperial tobacco factory was constructed in Liverpool on its Boundary Lane site in 1899 by the Architect Henry Hartley in a heterogeneous and pleasingly indiscriminate ‘Queen Anne style’. It was a statement...
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21 October 2016
Trafalgar Day
Today LASSCO commemorates Trafalgar Day. 211 years ago today the His Majesty’s Royal Navy encountered the combined Franco-Spanish fleet off a headland near Cadiz in a place known as Cape Trafalgar. In the heavy fighting that followed the Royal Navy, though outgunned and outnumbered, achieved a stunning and decisive victory that captured the waves for...
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18 October 2016
Skill & Labour
In the Glass works of Central and Northern Europe at the middle point of the Twentieth Century a remarkable concord was achieved between the rigours of the industrial process and the artistic brilliance of a generation of craftsmen. The return to handmade glassware during the Final Act of the Industrial Age can seem unsurprising to...
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29 September 2016
Salvaged From Obscurity – Half A Century On.
LASSCO has unearthed a large batch of decorative tiles from an historic London architectural gem, long thought lost without a trace. ‘Southampton Buildings’, headquarters of the Birkbeck Bank, stood between High Holborn and Chancery Lane between 1896 and 1964. The vast Victorian banking hall was built in two years by T.R. Knightley and Co. At...