Our Story

My love affair with secondhand started long before vintage became fashionable now I consider myself a custodian of vintage.

As a child, I would go with my aunt to Deptford Market, rummage through jumble sales and watch homemade clothes come together at the kitchen table. It wasn’t a sustainability statement; it was simply what she could afford. Somewhere amongst those market stalls, mismatched buttons and pre loved treasures, I learnt something that has stayed with me ever since.

By my twenties, I had developed a serious fascination with antiques. I spent weekends wandering fairs, hunting for pieces to furnish my bedroom, which somewhat ambitiously I wanted to resemble Michelangelo Renaissance style. I loved, anything that looked as though it might have lived a considerably more glamorous life than I had.

Then came my thirties, when money was tight but my appetite for beautiful things remained completely unreasonable. Charity shops became my new obsession. long before secondhand had acquired its cachet; admitting you had bought something from a second hand shop could still produce the sort of reaction normally reserved for saying you had found it in a skip. I didn’t care, I knew the thrill of spotting the perfect cushion for the sofa, an impossibly good retro suede jacket hiding between two polyester blouses, or simply a mug that made the morning coffee feel a little nicer.

And that, really, is where Curio Foundation comes from.

It is built on a lifelong belief that good things are everywhere if you develop an eye for them.

Curio Foundation is, in many ways, the grown up version of that little girl wandering around Deptford Market.

Still looking.

Still rummaging.

Still convinced the best thing in the room might be the thing everyone else walked past.