One thing leading to another, while restoring a newly acquired ancestral home in a Lanaudière village, two retirees have developed such a passion for old light fixtures that they have become experts.
It all started in 2014 when Marc Laurendeau and his wife, Michèle Galarneau, acquired a huge Victorian house in Saint-Félix-de-Valois that needed to be completely redone.
“After replacing all the vintage lamps in the house, we continued to search for all kinds and to make a beautiful collection of them,” Ms. Galarneau told us.
The couple first focused their research on junk shops and antique dealers in different regions of Quebec, including Mauricie, Lanaudière, the Laurentians and Quebec.
Simon Dessureault / QMI AGENCY
Mr. Laurendeau and Mrs. Galarneau now own more than 400 lamps – assembled and in separate parts – dating from the 1940s and earlier. Some even date back to the 1800s.
But collecting did not come alone. Mr. Laurendeau started restoring lamps and became a lamp maker. Mrs. Galarneau, she takes care of the management of the advertisements on the Internet to sell them.
“I dismantle old, damaged lamps and I completely redo the electricity, I rebuild all the sockets, explained Mr. Laurendeau, a former building foreman and carpenter by training. I try to keep the version of the original lamp, but I redo the interior of the lamp completely.»
Then, he meticulously takes care of the shells, these lampshades which constituted a very fashionable pageantry in the past.
“You have to pass the shells with an industrial degreaser so that the colors come back the same from one shell to another,” added the craftsman, adding that nicotine affected their colors at times when people smoked a lot inside. .
Simon Dessureault / QMI AGENCY
He can therefore spend more than twenty hours restoring a lamp and a lot of time also doing research to find out what the object originally looked like.
“Marc has become very good at his art,” says his wife, noting that some of their rare lamps can sell for up to $2,000.
“I’m looking for models that are a little more exclusive, a little rarer,” Mr. Laurendeau explained to us, adding that the art deco lamps in the “slip shade” styles (with lampshades that are fixed in place by sliding them ) and “streamline” (1930s design favoring sober, sleek, slender forms with rounded surfaces and corners), as well as opaline lamps (made up of glass shades in milky tints) are the most popular.
The house has thus become over time a real workshop, then a kind of museum given the impressive collection it houses. We had the chance to go there for the purposes of this report, but the couple does not welcome the public, their sales being done via the web only. For information: https://www.facebook.com/micheleetmarc