Most of what we sell comes from a phone call.

Someone — usually a publican’s son or daughter, sometimes an auctioneer, sometimes just a neighbour — rings to say a pub is closing and asks if we’d be interested in coming to look. We almost always go.

What We Look For

The good stuff is rarely on the walls. The walls usually have framed prints and brewery posters from the last twenty years, which are mass-produced and uninteresting. The good stuff is in the back rooms, the storerooms, the cellars, and the spaces above the bar that haven’t been touched in decades.

Original advertising signs from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Pendulum clocks made when “Made in Ireland” still meant something. Tap badges, ice buckets, ashtrays, glassware with brewery markings that haven’t been used in thirty years. Illuminated bar lamps that still work because they were built to.

What We Leave Behind

Reproductions. Modern brewery merchandise. Anything that looks aged but isn’t. Anything where the provenance can’t be established. We’ve turned down whole rooms of stock because nothing in them was real.

The pub trade has been flooded with reproduction Guinness signs for years. Most of what looks vintage in a tourist pub is from a wholesale catalogue. We can tell the difference, and we won’t sell anything we can’t stand over.

From Clearance to Listing

Every piece comes back to the workshop in Kinvara. We clean it carefully — not restore, just clean. We photograph it honestly, including any damage. We research what we can about its era and origin. We write the listing in plain English and price it according to what it is.

Then it goes up on the site. There’s only ever one of each.