A good share of the antique English copper tea kettles, French copper bowls and assorted other metal kitchen accessories found in shops on the East Coast of the United States are available directly from www.jonof.com . Sarah Hardcastle founded the small English export company after a skiing holiday in Beaver Creek, Colorado. "I went into a few antiques shops and saw the kitchen items they were selling and for how much, and within a week I had started Jonof," says Hardcastle, a former marketing services director for a London futures exchange and an avid antiquer.
Sarah and her husband, John, who recently joined her in the business, buy vintage items in the categories of kitchen accessories, ceramics such as faience and Quimper, clocks, silver and wood boxes, and candlesticks in France and at the antiques fairs and markets of England, and they serve both collectors and dealers around the world who find them on the internet. "I shop for customers in my e-mails," Sarah jokes.
"We have clients from San Francisco and South Carolina to Norway and Japan who are interested in Victorian tea pots, hundred-year-old French copper mixing bowls and a variety of collectibles," she says. Hardcastle and her husband live and work (with a staff) of two in a mid-19th-century house the couple restored in Hertfordshire, 25 miles outside of London.
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June 2002
