Our Story

The phrase is literal. Nearly everything here was made for a household — a sideboard built to hold linen, a lamp wired for a room that has since been remodeled twice, a plate that went to the table every Sunday for forty years. Our work is to find those objects, understand them, and put them back into use.

Old on its own is not the standard. A piece earns a place in the collection because of how it was made, what it was made from, and whether it has another century of use left in it. What we look for is evidence of a hand: a chamfer cut by eye, a glaze wiped thin at the foot, a hinge mortised in rather than screwed to the surface.

Pieces come from estates, private collections, regional liquidations, and the occasional stroke of luck. Each one is cleaned, assessed, and researched before it is listed.

We date from construction evidence rather than from style — forge marks against cut stock, punched holes against drilled, cored castings against solid, hand-chased ornament against die-formed — because an idiom can be revived in any decade while a manufacturing method cannot be used before it exists. When the evidence supports a twenty-year window, that is the window we give.

Condition is described as we find it. Where a piece has been repaired, refinished, or had a part replaced, the listing says so.

Jessica Sue Lupo comes from a long line of interior designers and leads curation and design. She works in rooms rather than in objects: what a piece does to the light around it, what it asks of the wall behind it, how a chair built in 1890 sits beside one built in 1960 without either looking like an accident. Her rule is that a space should feel collected, not decorated.

Walter Hinchman came to furniture through machines — more than twenty years rebuilding motorcycles and restoring furniture, and now restoration and operations here. The discipline is the same in both: knowing when to stop. Stabilize the joint, save the original surface a stripper would have erased, leave the wear that proves the piece was used. Restoration is credited to The Hinchman Collective, and the listing names what was done.

In October the collection moves to street level in the Morris, a 1931 hotel at 400 East Fourth Street, inside the E. Fourth Street Historic District. It was built for travelers arriving by rail and on the Lincoln Highway, and it has stood on the same corner since. The ground floor has been selling beautiful things for most of a century — among them a dress shop that opened in 1941, behind the same windows.

Photographs flatten furniture. A piece you have only seen on a screen reads differently standing in a room with light on it, which is the whole argument for coming in. The building has a history of its own.

Interior design. Jessica takes on single rooms and whole houses, working historic pieces into a home that still has to function for a modern life. Begin Your Design Journey.

Consignment. We place pieces on behalf of estates, downsizing households, and collectors who want their furniture to go somewhere it will be understood. Consignment inquiries.

Trade and wholesale. Designers, dealers and shops buy at wholesale through Faire, with trade documentation available for freight, care and provenance. Trade & Wholesale Resources.