BARNS REVEAL PRIZED BOUNTY
A Vancouver furniture- maker heads to Quebec on a mission to hunt for vintage treasure
What do you say when one of the owners of Vancouver’s Farmhouse Collections — a bespoke retailer specializing in Quebec antiques and custom furniture — calls you up one day and invites you on a shopping trip? You ask Kelly King: When do we leave? That’s because we weren’t talking about a trip to the mall or local antique dealer. We were talking about barns, old barns in Quebec’s townships, the kind of places that hold untold vintage treasures. The kind of places most people will never see. What prompted this last- minute, one- day whirlwind buying trip? “Doors, pretty doors and blue wood,” said King. King, who has had a hammer in hand since he was boy and loves furniture not only with quality, but a pedigree, has always been drawn to designing and building unique pieces. He spent years in construction before he and business partner Haward Palmateer started Farmhouse Collections 18 years ago with their first shop on Vancouver’s Main Street. Today, their warehouse- sized store on Marine Drive, which they opened several years ago in conjunction with their nowclosed South Granville location, is a go- to destination for those looking for authentic and repurposed country- style furniture. Before I knew it, we were on a plane bound for Montreal, picking up a 17- foot U- Haul truck and barrelling along Highway 20 headed for Drummondville. King, who hadn’t been on a buying trip to the area in nearly four years, pointed to a sign on our left and laughed: “Whatever that said, we don’t know.” He knew where we were going, and that was a good thing, given that all the directional signs were only in French, a language not terribly familiar to either of us. The adventure had begun. Our shopping day started early — just like a good Black Friday run. We fuelled up on food and gas, which yielded the first purchase of the day — maple syrup — but we passed on the fur coats. ( Yes, fur coats and other gamy goods were on offer at the gas station, another sign that we weren’t on the West Coast any more.) Then it was off to Victoriaville, located east of Montreal in central Quebec along the Nicolet River, one of the antique hubs for which the area is known. Arriving just before 8 a. m., King took me to Benoit Rochefort Antiques, to give me a taste of the kinds of things we might stumble upon during our shopping adventure. The store wasn’t open, but there were plenty of goods to look at outside, leaning against the walls and in a covered entry. King spotted an old front door and I eyed a battered red wooden wheelbarrow. “You can smell it,” King said, glancing over the landscape. “Just look around, there is stuff in all these barns.” King’s passion for what he does — the thrill of the find — is immeasurable, as is the knowledge he brings to the quest. There was a glow about him, an energetic anticipation every time we turned a corner.
We met up with his contact, who would take us “barning”, at Alain Chauvette Inc., one of many area antique shops. Before I knew it, a century- old Christmas sleigh was being carried to the truck, followed by a beautiful old church window with what King calls “peely” white paint. Among the other treasures: sheets of old tin ceiling and wooden carriage wheels. When the doors of the first barn were flung open, we found stacks and stacks of old pine floor boards with the original blue paint — a combination King covets — and dozens were soon being loaded into the truck. King moved like a human tornado. Every dark nook and cranny had something and he didn’t miss a thing. “Lori, you need to come up here to see the chairs,” I heard from a loft. I knew from the sound of his voice that he had found something I needed to see. I navigated my way through a dimly lit part of the barn, my path lit by the iPhones of our helpers. I climbed another level, up a rickety ladder to the top floor where I saw a mass of chairs. There were easily a thousand, all shapes and sizes, stacks piled on top of the other in every direction. King negotiated with the barn owner for half a dozen, along with old wall cupboard doors, solid exterior shutters with original paint and rat- tail hinges, matching white metal beds — among other things. “I think we may need another truck,” he said. He was right. A second barn had three floors and a working elevator. King spotted some must- haves, including an 1890s castiron bed on castors with the original hardware that pushes together and locks. Barns three and four were close to one another and perhaps the most fun to “pick.” ( As King puts it: “I pick from pickers, who pick from pickers.”) First came the fancy doors. King picked through each, one by one, row after row. Some dated to the 1790s and no two were alike. Many had been carved by the original homeowners as individual statement pieces. King selected 11, some to be cleaned up and sold as is as architectural statement pieces, others to be transformed into mirrors or used as part of other furniture, like large cupboards. The third barn also housed an unimaginable number of blanket boxes and trunks, stacks of them in every size and finish. I lost King at one point when I noticed a penned- off area behind a stack of steamer trunks, and climbed over to take a look. “Kelly,” I screeched, “there are ducks! There are lots and lots of ducks!” Thinking I meant live ones, King must have thought I was losing it until he found me hovering over the pen. With that, a handful of little hard- carved wooden friends were plucked from their pen and taken to the truck. Then came barn number four, or what King nicknamed “the door barn.” Soon he was standing on a heap of doors stacked haphazardly some 12 feet in the air. There were also thousands of peeling cupboard doors and shutters, all sizes, shapes and colours. The doors started flying as King tossed them one after the other to one of our crew standing on the pile above, who in turn passed to another helper midway to the ground, who in turn passed them to me and out they went to the truck. We took dozens of doors and were about to leave when one of the fellows asked “want a sap can?” He pointed to an old silo across the field. There they were stacked in a pyramid against the silo: hundreds of rusty old sap cans once used for tapping maple syrup. To the right of them: a horde of vintage Singer sewing machine bases. The truck was almost full, but we weren’t done yet. After a quick lunch, we headed off to look inside a shipping container parked outside 3A Antiques, where we found more pretty doors and even more rusty tin. 3A owner Jean- Francois Ayotte has curated a beautiful shop full of antiques, custom pieces and his own custom kitchen displays, making it a worthy destination in its own right. With the truck nearly splitting at the seams, we then headed off to check out a fifth barn — a distinct building with doors painted with folk art cows. Inside, we looked up to see a treasure trove of tables, 300 to 400 crammed on the upper floor. Another upper loft held a mass of chairs, and across the barn there was even more stuff jammed up to the rafters. King sifted through much of it and took out a few things. I thought we may have reached our limit. Turns out we were far from finished. We may have been done with the barns for the day, but with an hour to spare before the local shops closed, we checked out a few of King’s favourite places in Sainte- Eulalie and, yes, ended up needing another truck and trailer. While we spotted a few more wooden carriages and sleighs, we had to decline due to space, and resisted an assortment of tombstones ( clearly, nothing is sacred any more), but King did fetch a pretty flight of stairs and another door, adding his finds to the red wooden wheelbarrow I picked up for myself. The shopping truck, along with a pickup and a trailer, were now full. A second day of shopping was not in the cards. We were done. And had done well. The haul of hand- picked pieces that would soon be on a container shipped back to Vancouver also included a lovely 1850s sideboard, an old working grain scale, windows, a hand- forged metal rooster, benches, hardware, wagons, and, yes, a few sap cans for good measure. But the best pick of that memorable day? An entire barn.