At home with Drew Pritchard, salvage hunter extraordinaire
‘Salvage Hunters’ star Drew Pritchard tells Boudicca Fox-Leonard that Covid hasn’t stopped people searching for antiques at his showroom
On the morning of our interview, before Drew Pritchard had even got out of his antique bed he’d bought an 18th-century marble bench, a pair of painted obelisks, two heraldic panels, a plaster frieze of the Parthenon and a 19th-century campaign chest.
That could be considered the definition of madness, I tell him, if it wasn’t what he did for a living.
“It is madness in a way,” he agrees. Despite working in the decorative salvage market for more than 30 years, even he still can’t believe what he gets to do for a living.
Pritchard spends between £5,000 and £10,000 a day on stock, describing it as a “compulsion and an absolute addiction”.
At 6pm his newsletter goes out with seven or so new pieces, all of which will sell quickly, meaning new stock needs to be bought. “There are 20 pieces arriving tomorrow, they’ll be online by the end of the week, and another 40 pieces are arriving the next week. It never ends. It’s a constant flow of pieces and I love it,” says the 50-year-old.
The majority go to the upper echelons of the interior design trade around the world. He supplies the likes of Soho House as well as celebrities. Who else can claim to have supplied an antique greenhouse to Jim Carrey in Beverly Hills? Or a lamp for Diane Keaton’s kitchen?
Not bad for a boy from a council estate in North Wales, who flunked out of school and started in the business sweeping the floor and lifting boxes into the back of a van.
Pritchard is the “Boy Done Good” in Conwy, his home town, where he still has his warehouse and showroom, shops and employs locals.
He’d already been in the business for years, having trained as an antique stained-glass restorer, when the offer came to appear on a TV series.
Now he’s known around the world – with 19 million views a day worldwide – for Salvage Hunters, the Quest TV programme that follows him and his old friend T around the UK and Europe, seeking out antique gold.
The show has become a juggernaut, one that even the pandemic couldn’t stop. “Two fat lads in a van, who knew?” he says. Pritchard spent most of last year filming, at one point with a scaleddown production team self-isolating in his house.
There’s also been time for a book,
Man with a Van: My Story, which is published next week, an honest, forthright account of his life that tempers salvage hunting with his personal account of his divorce from Rebecca (a popular fixture on the show) six years ago, as well as opening up about his relationship with alcohol and his 34-year battle with panic attacks.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there on the internet, so it was good to set it straight,” he says.
Still, no one’s more surprised than Pritchard that there’s an appetite for his personal story . The book he’d pitched was very different, and may yet be written, but he hopes that this volume demonstrates how “You can come out of the middle of nowhere, with no education, and be a success.”
We’re chatting on Zoom, with Pritchard sitting in the study of his cottage near Conwy, a stone’s throw from the sea. It’s a tiny space but a microcosm of his good taste – which, incidentally, he says you’ve either got or you’ve not. Gulp!
The room is painted in Farrow & Ball Green, to which he likes to add a bit of blackboard black to make it extra matt. Behind him is a beautiful Aesthetic Movement painted cabinet (“Extremely rare, I got it out of a burnt-out house in Wales last summer”). There’s a pile of coffee table books next to him, as befits an autodidact who can talk authoritatively on Morris and Pugin. Oil paintings hang from the walls and above them is an original signed copy of God
Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols. There has been a punk sensibility to his life that’s still there, despite all the success and the business with a monthly turnover of £150,000.
Viewers will be used to his fast, nononsense transactions that are the antithesis of the haggling shown on other TV antique shows, which he thinks is a disgrace.
How he works is how it really is, he says. “If I’m going around a fair, there are 500 stalls to see. I don’t have time to stand around messing about. If someone gives me a silly price I walk straight away. If they give me a good price I go, ‘Yep, sold’. It cuts out a huge amount of nonsense, and it means the next time they will give me the best price immediately. And once you get that mentality it makes life a lot easier.”
When it comes to what to buy, he admits he doesn’t do it the way other dealers do: “I buy things that I love. I fall in love 20 times a day, imagining them in my house. I just want to own these things for a brief while and have them come through my hands. As a dealer you just get in the middle of a deal before it goes elsewhere.”
He’s not joking. His home is a movable feast. Everything in his house is for sale – although the beautiful cabinet I’m eyeing over his shoulder is currently off the website – and it’s not unusual for him to come home and for the sofa to have been sold. His children grew up with four different dining tables.
Pritchard relishes the visual side of his business, curating his own home and showroom, in life and on Instagram, joking that he was one of those kids who would rearrange their bedroom and adjust the posters every weekend.
Last year his showroom was only open for five weeks due to Covid but it was his busiest year since 1994, thanks to his online presence. “People have been nesting like billy-oh!” he exclaims.
And if there’s a reason we’re demanding more antique brown furniture than before, he says it’s because we’re all fed up with the cycle of buying poor quality
and throwing it away. Buy something from Ikea and it’s almost worthless – in terms of resale value – the moment you take it out of the shop.
But much like the evolution of British food since the 1970s, we’ve been slowly educating our aesthetic palates. While Pritchard says that most of the best British 18th-century furniture has gone, both to America and into antique dealer’s sheds (“20 pieces of good quality is like having a pension ready for when you need it”) he reassures me there’s still beautiful stuff to be bought, surfacing through the thousands of house clearances that happen every day. “It’s like ploughing a field. Stuff just turns up.”
Just the other day he bought an 18thcentury oak chest of drawers for his son for £220. “And it’s a really good one. That wasn’t even a trade price, I just walked into the shop and said, ‘ I’ll have that’.”
Still, the past year hasn’t been without its challenges. Brexit means he’s lost a huge chunk of his trade, with none of his usual shippers prepared to deliver items because they can’t guarantee the French government won’t tax them. I tell him I’m surprised that there’s such a market for British antiques on the continent. However, Pritchard calls it a “constant river that flows both ways”.
“The British have made the best furniture in the world for the last 250 years. Nobody comes close. Even our junk is better than everything else. On the continent they are buying it all, and we’re buying this dreadful, whitepainted French stuff!”
People always ask him what the best thing he’s bought is, and he always has the same response: “The next thing.”
His advice, if you’ve already got the same bug, is not to worry. “All you need is that imaginary house in your head and a measuring tape, and you’ll be all right.”
‘I just buy things that I love. I fall in love 20 times a day, imagining them in my house’