In the olden days – when people were antiques – low-hanging light fixtures were common. Traditionally, houses had much fewer windows and skylights were an absolute rarity, because of the higher cost of heating and cooling. People were also shorter on average in these times! If your old home has low-hanging light fixtures, either over tables, or just out in the open, there is an easy, 1-person method for getting them out of the way.

Provided your fixtures are on chains, grab a piece of heavy-duty baling wire and snip off a 4” (10cm) length. Pull the fixture up so that the lowest link of the chain meets up with the highest, or with the ring at the top. Push the wire through the openings of both together, and twist it several times to secure it. For a visual guide to this, have a look at this video:

If you only need the fixtures out of the way temporarily, you can just the leave the wire in until it is no longer needed – if you have tied it up for renovations, taking the shades off the bulbs will be an added protection for your investments. If you want to tie it there permanently, grab another link of similar chain (or an entirely new, shorter chain) – cut a slot in the side with bolt cutters, then solder it back up when you have inserted the link into the rest of the chain. You can then remove the wire, and never needed to take down the fixture!

We are so pleased to have had our doorknobs mentioned in Newsweek as one the most unique and stylish around – not to mention getting pride of place in the article, with just as much space as the entire text has! The door knobs featured are replicas of Louis XVI style door knobs – if you couldn’t tell from the intricate detail and patterning on the knob that it would look right at home in a castle. Newsweek has acknowledged what we have been telling you for so long now, that door knobs can smarten up (or dumb down!) the look of an entire room. They are your first tactile experience of a room – the first thing you come into contact with – and the miniscule patterning on this knob would leave a distinct impression on your hands. The other knobs featured in the article provided a great mix of complementary styles to our own knobs, and opposite styles, so that there was something for everyone. The Drummonds knobs, replicas of one salvaged from the door of a library in a Victorian estate, may even find that the originals make their way into our own collection at some stage. What a small world!

We only have one final comment for Newsweek – that you can also be dumb as a post, dumb as a doornail and dumb as a dodo!

One of the technical aspects of buying door hardware which is sometimes overlooked, to the sound of wails and moans, is fitting the handle you like to the lock that is already on your door. You may be in for more than you bargained for if you buy some gorgeous handles, whether they are reproductions or originals, and find that you need to replace all of your locks to use them… Hopefully you are in a position to first choose all of your door handles, and then get locks to match – since the door handle is the part of you that expresses your personality and originality. It is hard to imagine your guests commenting on the smooth and silent working of your locks! On the other hand, handles frequently become the showpieces of a house. Not all of us are lucky enough to be in a position to replace all of the locks on our doors when we replace our doorhandles, and in this case, you can avoid disappointment and extra expense by checking through this guide, to see whether your new door handles will fit your existing locks. You will need to look at:

The keyhole

Most antique lever handles come with small, barrel keyholes. Quite often, lever handles don’t have keyholes at all – definitely a con if you want to put it on an outside door! Sometimes you will have to decide between security and authenticity, though – the barrel keys are definitely not as secure as modern locks. Many of the reproductions on our website come with the option of a modern lock, though, so you can come to a compromise between your two needs.

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Door knobs are a feature of your home that everybody notices, because nearly everybody that comes into your home must touch and utilise them. People will notice their look, and how that works with what is around it, and they will notice their feel … whether they are made of a cold material, whether they are comfortable to open, how fragile they seem, and even how clean they are. Unfortunately, how clean your door knobs are is often something you won’t notice until that rare day when you go around and clean them, and you can feel how bad they must have been beforehand!

Door knobs made recently are usually made from either metal or porcelain, for durability, ease of use, and to be unobtrusive in modern décor. Those same doorknobs look terrible if you have a home filled with ornate furniture, rich woods, carpets, chandeliers and older fabrics! But just because door knobs today are made with durability (and also affordability) at the forefront of people’s minds, does not mean that if you want a doorknob that you don’t have to replace and is easy to use you have to go to your local hardware store. Antique door knobs are one of the items from olden times that are highly prized, and many beautiful ones have been kept.

Unlike in modern-styled homes, your old home can also look great with different door knobs in each room. It’s different; it has character; it is not a mass produced wood and concrete box, which needs uniformity to avoid offending the eye. Which is lucky for you, since many places you will find antique door knobs will not have unlimited stock on demand depending on how many doors you have in your house, and whether you want to match your closets to your walkways!

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Perhaps the world’s most unusual chandelier is in the ossuary in Sedlec, in what used to be Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. It may seem, when you first look at it, to be the world’s most macabre chandelier – perhaps a relic of a long-forgotten Church of Satan – but it is not. The cemetery there at one time had some earth from Golgotha, the hill on top of which Christ was crucified, sprinkled on it. Soon, people from far and wide wanted to be buried with the soil which might have held Christ’s blood. So the cemetery outgrew it’s original capacity, and especially during the Black Death plague in Europe in the Middle Ages, there were many more bodies than it could handle.

The Gothics began to build a church in the centre of the cemetery in about 1400, which was to have a lower and upper level – unfortunately, there were a bunch of pesky dead people in the way of the lower level … After 1511 the task of exhuming skeletons and stacking their bones in the chapel was, according to legend, given to a half-blind monk of the order. In 1870, the Schwarzenberg family employed František Rint, a woodcarver, to put the bone heaps in some sort of order … luckily they didn’t decide just to burn them. The carver, it seems, missed his calling in life as a bone arranger … maybe an orthopaedic surgeon (!) He created four huge mounds of bones in bell shapes in each corner of the chapel, as well as an enormous chandelier of bones, which actually contains at least one of every bone in the human body.

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