Curated Spaces is the marketplace giving vintage furniture a second chance

Sometime in 2015, Pip Newell did what most of us have done before: take a punt and buy some vintage furniture she found online. She searched and she scored, embracing her victorious (inexpensive) winning bid.

However, it was a different story when she brought the four dining chairs home. “They didn’t work with the space at all,” she says. But instead of sending them to exile in the shed, a friend suggested Newell put them back online for sale. “I was completely shocked because I ended up selling them for more than I paid for them.”

This wasn’t entirely due to luck or the right buyer at the right time. Before listing the item online, she wanted to ensure what happened to her didn’t happen to the next buyer, and gave the dining chairs some context.

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“I styled them in-situ and photographed them in a way that people could actually imagine them in their own home,” says Newell, who has a background in photography.

The chairs sold straight away and so she decided to sell some more vintage furniture, applying the same attention-to-detail in-situ styling to a Facebook group selling secondhand items.

After selling on Facebook for a year and half, Newell wanted to create her own platform.

“I was just one of thousands of people selling stuff a day and it was easy to get lost in the ether,” she says. In 2017,  she set up an Instagram page called Curated Spaces, which allowed her to sell vintage furniture more freely and offer a one-on-one service with customers with a likeminded aesthetic.

Curated Spaces is one of a growing number of Australian vintage furniture marketplaces cropping up on Instagram, with a two-fold focus. Newell’s focus is to bring good design to more people at affordable prices while also promoting sustainability by salvaging furniture otherwise destined for landfill.

“My goal is to reuse and repurpose as much furniture as we can,” she says. “So far we’ve sold 1000 secondhand pieces and the other day I tried to visualise how much space that would have taken up if it ended up in landfill.”

Newell says people are always surprised by the pieces she sources and eager to know where she finds such gold but she maintains it’s all out there “on Ebay, Gumtree, Facebook” but “the trick is being able to see potential and not just look at what it is but what it could be”.

“Some people say ‘one man’s trash is another person’s treasure’ but I really don’t see it that way. Most of the time I’m buying off people who really love their stuff but are downsizing, and hearing their stories are amazing and it’s so fun passing these stories onto the new owners.”

Up until a year ago, Newell did all the sourcing herself but upon relocating from Victoria to Queensland, she wanted to broaden her approach and make more furniture available to more people across Australia. She now works with a handful of sellers that also operate in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney.

“It’s so far been an easy transition as we all share a similar style,” says Newell, who remotely guides sellers to produce in-situ styled photography so the collection, while coming from across the country, shares a consistent presence online.

In 2020, she hopes the business will continue to grow with plans to move to a designated website and reach more people who’ll join her on her quest to give a second chance to vintage furniture. She’s aiming high too. “Imagine how amazing it would be if were able to save 10,000 pieces of vintage furniture?”