A passion for antique lighting

One thing leads to another, while renovating a newly acquired ancestral home in the village of Llanaudiere, two retirees develop such a passion for old light fixtures that they become experts.

It began in 2014 when Mark Laurendeau and his wife, Michelle Galarno, bought a massive Victorian house in Saint-Felix-de-Valois that needed a complete rebuild.

“After replacing all the period lamps in the house, we continued to look for all kinds and built a beautiful collection of them,” says Ms. Galarno told us.

The couple initially focused their research on junk shops and antiques in various parts of Quebec, including Maricy, Lanaudière, Laurentians, and Quebec.

Mr. Laurendo and Mrs. Galarno now have more than 400 lamps — dating from the 1940s and earlier — assembled and separate. Some even date back to the 1800s.

But the collections did not just come. Mr. Laurendo began restoring lamps and became a lamp manufacturer. Ms. Galarneau handles advertising on the Internet to sell them.

“I tear down the old, damaged lamps and I completely redo the electricity, I rebuild all the sockets, explained Mr. Laurendo, a former building foreman and carpenter by training. I try to keep a version of the original lamp, but I completely redo the interior of the lamp.

Then, he takes care of the shells, these lampshades were a very fashionable display in the past.

“You have to pass the shells with an industrial degreaser so that the colors return from one shell to another,” added the craftsman, adding that nicotine affects their colors at times when people smoke heavily inside.

Hence he can spend more than twenty hours restoring the lamp and also spend a lot of time researching to find out how the object was originally.

“Mark was very good at his art,” says his wife, noting that some of their rare lamps sell for up to $2,000.

“I’m looking for models that are a little bit unique, a little bit rare,” Mr. Laurendo explained to us, art deco lamps in the “slip shade” styles (with lampshades fixed by sliding them. ) and the “streamline” (a 1930s design with rounded surfaces and corners that are sober, elegant, thin suitable for forms), as well as opaline lamps (made with glass shades in milky tints) are extremely popular.

Thus the house over time became a real workshop, and then a kind of museum that housed an impressive collection. For the purposes of this report we had the opportunity to go there, but the couple does not welcome the public, their sales are only done through the web. For information: https://www.facebook.com/micheleetmarc