About

Over twenty years’ experience of collecting and restoring antique furniture and bronze sculpture has led to the formation of Olive Mount Antiques. Trading in antiques became a necessity because of the scale of the collecting.

Over the last ten to fifteen years we have developed a passion for the furniture of Gillows’ of Lancaster and London, one of the most iconic names in furniture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centauries. We now boast an important collection of this magnificent furniture, several items are one off commissions and are featured in Susan E. Stewart’s volumes Gillows’ of Lancaster and London 1730 to 1840. The collection that we have also includes items up to the time that Gillows’ was taken over by Wearings’, trading as Waring and Gillow.

About Gillows & Co.

Gillows of Lancaster and London was a unique firm of furniture makers. No other firm had a provincial manufacturing base which could produce furniture at a cheaper price for retail in the capital. This enabled the firm to make fine furniture in fashionable hardwoods imported into Lancaster from across the Atlantic. They could modify fashionable styles to suit either provincial or metropolitan customers.

Gillows left the largest and most comprehensive archive of business papers to have survived from any furniture maker. It covers the years 1728-1932 and includes sketch books and letter books. They had thousands of customers from the highest ranks of the nobility, to merchants, and the middle classes. From about 1788 some furniture was stamped ‘Gillow’ or ‘Gillows Lancaster’, or more rarely ‘Gillows London and Lancaster’. Other pieces can be identified by finding the design in the Estimate Sketch books. In 1813 the Gillow family sold the firm but its name survived in succeeding partnerships until the late-20^th century.

Viewings strictly by appointment.